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.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Biking/Walking, Transportation.