bike sharing

High school students haven't gotten much attention as potential bike-share users, but as former Chicago and DC transportation chief Gabe Klein recently told CNN, that's a mistake: "We should absolutely be giving these kids memberships or reduced-fee memberships because it lowers our costs." To make it happen, current rules will have to change.

Will the companies be able to maintain safe bikes, provide good service, and stay financially viable in the long run? It's too soon to say. But in the early going, they are proving that plenty of people will use bike-share in a city where it previously flopped.

Riding a bicycle is too often thought of as an activity that's off-limits for many disabled people. And that has continued to be the case with the bike-share systems getting off the ground in several American cities, which provide standard bicycles meant for the able-bodied. But that's starting to change, thanks to a yearlong effort in Portland that's the first of its kind in the United States.

Open streets events, or ciclovias, give people a new way to explore their city's streets. Without cars on the streets, they're a natural opportunity for people who don't usually ride a bike to hop on two wheels -- and that's precisely why it's important to include bike-share systems in the mix, says Stefani Cox at the Better Bike Share Partnership.

If Seattle is going to give bike-share another try, it will have to learn from this experience. The Pronto system started off small and never scaled up. And that mandatory helmet law really didn't help.

Bike-share in Seattle should be doing great, but it has floundered -- and a big reason may be the city's mandatory helmet law.

The Chicago-based Shared-Use Mobility Center hopes their new interactive toolkit, released last week, will help cities expand the use of car-sharing, bike-sharing, and other forms of shared mobility, especially in low-income communities with limited transportation options. The toolkit includes a Shared Mobility Benefits Calculator, a Shared Mobility Policy Database, and an Interactive shared Mobility Mapping and Opportunity Analysis Tool.

Back in September 2014, former Illinois governor Pat Quinn announced a $3 million grant to help expand the Divvy system into Oak Park and Evanston, as well new areas on Chicago’s West Side and in the Rogers Park neighborhood. The plan was to install 70 stations and 700 bikes by spring or summer of 2015.

So far, the customer base of American bike-share systems has skewed toward affluent white men. But cities have been working to make the systems more useful and accessible to a broader spectrum of people, and in a new report, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has compiled some of the lessons learned.