Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Bike Sharing

What Cities Are Learning About Making Bike-Share More Equitable

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 16, 2015 | 9 Comments

So far, the customer base of American bike-share systems has skewed toward affluent white men. But cities have been working to make the systems more useful and accessible to a broader spectrum of people, and in a new report, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has compiled some of the lessons learned. Here are a […]

America’s Biggest Bike-Share Operator Now Makes Its Own Bikes

By Ben Fried | May 7, 2015 | No Comments

Motivate, the company that runs bike-share systems in several large American cities, is now manufacturing its own bikes. That might explain why the timetable for Citi Bike expansion has been getting a lot firmer. When the current Motivate management team took over last fall, they inherited two big problems. Most of their systems ran on flawed software that crippled reliability […]

NACTO: If You Want Bike-Share to Succeed, Put Stations Close Together

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 29, 2015 | 24 Comments

A new study from the National Association of City Transportation Officials [PDF] adds credence to the theory that station density is a key factor in whether a bike-share system will flourish or flop. In its analysis of bike-share systems across the U.S., NACTO found that stations that are close to other stations see more use. In addition, […]

Bike-Share Comes to Philly With the Launch of Indego

By Clarence Eckerson Jr. | Apr 24, 2015 | No Comments

On Thursday, Philadelphia’s long wait for a bike-share system came to an end with the launch of the 60-station, 600-bike Indego system, which is set to expand in the near future. At the kickoff, volunteers and officials — including Mayor Michael Nutter — rode about half of those bikes to their docking stations. I got to talk to […]

Two Key Factors That Can Make or Break a Bike-Share Network

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 26, 2015 | 11 Comments

What if you could dramatically increase the usefulness of a bike-share system without adding any bicycles or docks? Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business have come up with a model that they say could help even the most successful bike-share systems in the world get more bang for the buck. The […]

The Common Mistake That Undermines American Bike-Share Systems

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 18, 2015 | 14 Comments

One of the leading architects of New York City’s bike-share system, NYC DOT alum Jon Orcutt, is on a mission to show how the design of bike-share networks affects their success. Orcutt created this animation warning against a fairly common practice in smaller American cities: splitting the bike-share network up into separate clusters of stations. […]

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