Today I participated in a conference call and online training for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Freewheelin/Bikes Belong bike-sharing program. During the call, the trainer said that the recent Denver Freewheelin program, coinciding with the Democratic National Convention, had 5900 trips for a total of 26,000 miles. Remember that the “bike-partisan” challenge was to attain 10,000 trips and 25,000 miles, so the latter goal has been met.

I’ve also recently viewed two good videos on bike-sharing from Streetfilms: one on the Smartbike DC program, which is now underway, and another on the Paris Velib’ program, which started in July 2007. The most important thing I learned from the videos is this: bike-sharing can be thought of as a form of public transportation. For some reason, that concept had not yet entered my cranium.

In the Velib’ video, some of the people interviewed make the case that the bigger the program is, the more likely it is to succeed. One person commented that there should be at least one bike for every 200 residents. They gave these numbers for Paris: 20,600 bikes, 1451 stations, and 3 million subscribers. Now the Bicycle-sharing Blog is reporting that by the end of 2008 Velib’ will grow into the inner Paris suburbs and add 7,500 bikes and 300 more stations.

It looks like Smartbike DC, starting with 60 bikes at 10 stations, has begun too small. But I can hardly blame them for cautiously testing the waters in bike-phobic North America.

The Democratic and Republican political conventions will be here soon, with the Democrats meeting August 25-28 in Denver and the Republicans September 1-4 in St. Paul. Both conventions will have an unusual feature: bike-sharing programs that will make available 1000 bikes to the public in each city for free.

The program is a joint venture of the Humana Freewheelin bike-share program and Bikes Belong, a non-profit bicycle advocacy organization funded by the bicycle industry. Humana is a large health insurance company that has had success with an employee bike-share program at its headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’m excited about the convention bike-share opportunity because I’ve been following the spread of “new generation” bike-sharing programs for the past year, particularly the enormous Velib’ program in Paris, France, which started last summer. These newer bike-sharing programs are more high-tech than the “yellow-bike”-type of program that some cities and college campuses have had. Those older programs have usually been plagued by theft, vandalism, and disrepair, since the bikes are not locked, there is no system of checking the bikes out, and there are few resources for maintaining the bikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday my family and I came home from a week’s vacation in Wisconsin and, after a long day of travel, unpacking, and child care, I watched the Olympics on television. Flipping through the channels during the commercials, I landed on a local cable access channel and found the commissioners of my county - the elected officials that run Rice County, Minnesota - discussing transportation issues at a recent working session.

The county transportation engineer, Dennis Luebbe, proposed a policy that concerned me: banning county funding of facilities such as sidewalks and bike paths in future transportation capital improvement projects. The policy would immediately effect county funding of a recent local project that has been contentious: the Woodley Street/CSAH 28 project here in Northfield. Note also that the county receives funding from the state for transportation infrastructure; state funds, of course, come from our income tax, sales taxes, and other taxes and fees that we pay.

Mr. Luebbe said that bike/ped facilities might be considered in projects outside of the CIP, but that hardly seems satisfactory. I will await further comment until I locate the text of the policy and receive an answer from Mr. Luebbe regarding my questions:

1. Is the proposed policy available for viewing online? If not, would you send us a copy? If a rationale is not included in the text of the policy, we are interested in learning that also.

2. Do other counties have a similar policy? Which ones do you know of?

Here is the PDF of the policy, which was sent to me by Fran Windschitl at Rice County:

proposed-highway-cost-participation-policy