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Bike sharing coming to Denver
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Possible downtown Denver B-cycle kiosks
Paris is famous for many things, and rightfully so. It’s a beautiful city full of amazing museums, incredible food, lots of dog poop, maniacal drivers and, at times, an extremely progressive civic attitude. The city’s self-cleaning, public, pay toilet kiosks and its quixotic experiment with bike sharing are perfect examples of an administration that is willing to try innovative and off-the-wall solutions to urban problems. By many accounts, the program is enormously successful. There have been problems – nearly 15% of the bicycles were stolen in the first year – but, with an average of 120,000 trips per day taken on the shared bikes, the usage has been phenomenal.
Denver will try to recreate some of Paris’ successes, albeit on a smaller scale. Last week Mayor Hickenlooper announced that Denver will become one of the pilot cities for a bike sharing service offered by a company called B-cycle. B-cycle is a joint venture of Humana, Trek Bicycles and the advertising giant, Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Whereas Paris offers more than 20,000 bikes at nearly 1500 rental stations, Denver’s plan is to start with 500 bikes at 30-40 stations. Critical mass being an important factor in any metro commuting program, it’s very unclear whether such a limited number of cycles and stations will be sufficient to entice city travelers to make this choice in significant numbers.
It should be an exciting program to watch, and to try out. The program is not up and running yet, and it’s not entirely clear when you will see the first rental kiosks in the downtown area. But once the system becomes operational, I would expect many local cyclists to give it a try so they can judge for themselves whether the bikes are going to be satisfactory and if navigating city streets on a heavy one-speed will really be effective.
Why is Denver doing this? Some of the statistics quoted by B-cycle are pretty compelling:
• An average person loses 13 pounds in the first year of bicycle commuting
• Cars waste about 5 billion gallons of gas every year idling in traffic jams
• 50% of kids rode their bikes to school in 1964 and the child obesity rate was 12%
• 3% of kids rode bikes to school in 2004 and the child obesity rate increased to 45%
• When converting calories to gasoline BTUs, some experts claim we average the equivalent of 3000 mpg when commuting by bicycle
Obvious problems are not hard to foresee. Helmets are most likely not going to be included with the rental bikes, there will be thefts, bike maintenance will be an ongoing challenge and the tendency for bikes to congregate in the most popular locations will require some type of daily or weekly redistribution effort.
The company supplying the bikes and kiosks has a great web site – bcycle.com . When you check it out, go to the Who Wants it More link and enter your vote. Boulder is currently running number one in the nation, but votes from more Colorado cities can only add to our reputation as one of the healthiest, and most bicycle friendly, states in the nation.
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