How DC launched the most successful bike-sharing program in the U.S.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

How DC launched the most successful bike-sharing program in the U.S.

In D.C., Gabe Klein, a former VP at car-sharing pioneer ZipCar and political neophyte, was appointed head of the DOT. He had an “action agenda,” as he calls it, with more than 100 items on it—one of which was to launch a larger bike-share system. “Having come from ZipCar,” says Klein, now transportation commissioner for the city of Chicago (which, like New York, is launching a big bike-share system this spring), “I knew that any sort of nodal business was only as effective as the number of nodes you have.” While SmartBike was useful in terms of getting early adopters onboard and the public used to the idea, it was a trip to Montreal, with its Bixi system, that hinted at what a bike-share system could look like. SmartBike stations, Klein says, “were a construction project. It took months. You had to get PEPCO [the local electrical utility] out there, it had to be wired.” Bixi’s stations, by contrast, were solar-powered and modular. Where it could take three months to build a SmartBike station, Bixi stations could be set up in three days.

— The Best Bike-Sharing Program in the United States