Big news for Portland out of New York City: The Big Apple will launch a bike share system of 10,000 bikes by summer 2012. The company chosen to run the system is Portland-based Alta Planning and Design. The company says the bike sharing project will create 200 jobs in New York.
Alta also manages bike share systems in Boston and Washington DC, but Portland hasn’t determined yet who will run the local bike share program city council okayed moving forward last month.
Like Portland’s system, New York’s will focus on putting a high density of stations in certain neighborhoods where people could check out and return bikes for a small fee. Portland is looking at 740 bikes placed at stations just in downtown and inner Eastside (with a few far flung stations at places like Portland Community College on NE Killingsworth), while NYC is aiming at Manhattan south of 79th Street, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope, and Carroll Gardens. The cost to consumers looks like it’ll be about the same, with a Zipcar-style year-long membership in New York’s system costing “less than $100” and Portland’s likely to run you <a href=”http://bikeportland.org/2011/09/13/how-much-to-use-bike-sharing-in-portland-about-60-95-per-year-58820
“>$60-95.
Their timeline is faster than ours, though. By the time Portlanders can check out their first shared bikes in fall of 2013, New Yorkers will have already been cruising around their streets for a year.
My NYC friends tell me it’s not quite a bike-friendly town.
Then you don’t have friends in NYC, ya liar.
Will they also just be operating them in a small, obscure corner of the city, like us?
I won’t resort to personal name-calling, but defending unsustainable, naive and obviously corrupt wastes of YOUR money makes you look really stupid.
The timeline is hilarious considering the scale of the two projects. And the yearly zipcar style membership is total bullshit since programs like these should be targeting tourists and people not in the city year around.
All that said, I hope it works in both cities.
These bikes are really only for tourists and downtown workers, right?
Oh, for nice postcards too. Along with the streetcars.