The
Bloomberg administration is set to move ahead with plans to create a large-scale bike-sharing program that would make hundreds or even thousands of bicycles available for public use throughout New York City — a nimble, novel form of mass transit that has already become mainstream in cities like Washington and Paris. An
exhaustive proposal released by the city in 2009 offered a glimpse of how a bike-sharing program might look in New York. The study, by the Department of City Planning, envisioned an initial rollout of about 10,000 bikes that could be placed at automated kiosks below Central Park in Manhattan and in areas of Downtown Brooklyn, with a majority of bikes available in dense business districts. In Paris, the pioneer of bike-sharing, the bikes are used up to 150,000 times a day. Told of the plan late Monday, Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, expressed excitement for the idea. “Bike sharing has rapidly moved cycling into the mainstream in similar big cities,” he said. “The Big Apple will take to it like we’ve never lived without it.”
Read on in the NYT.
