Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC [3] the new DOT [4] Commissioner, and Transportation Alternatives [5], New York is becoming a more bike-friendly city, and more and more people are starting to bike regularly. Up next could be a bike-sharing program, which are already successful in many European Cities (Here's info about the Paris [6], Copenhagen [7], and Barcelona [8]models), and newly implemented in Washington D.C [9]. Everyone from city residents to tourists are nuts about bike-sharing: it's a cheap, easy, healthy, environmentally friendly way to get around cities. In NYC, where so many of our transit trips are short and congestion is only getting worse, bike sharing makes so much sense to me.

There's an experiment beginning July 10th to see what it could look like in New York. A "summer pilot program" produced by the Forum for Urban Design, the Storefront for Art & Architecture, and the City Bakery, the New York Bike-Share Project [10] will consist of 20 bikes available for 30 minute rentals (for free!) at a few locations in downtown Manhattan, and an exhibition and discussions about the feasibility for a long-term project.

Your help is needed to make it a success! The project wants to know how New Yorkers would use these bikes for short trips--so go for a ride! Or, better yet, join me in volunteering: There are shifts available from Thursday July 10th - Monday July 14th. If you'd like to help out, please e-mail info@forumforurbandesign.org [11]. I'll report back with pictures.

Read more: Bike-Sharing Gets Smart [12], Time, June 12, 2008

Bicycle-Sharing Program to Be First of Kind in U.S. [13], New York Times, April 27, 2008