On a trip to Washington DC over Memorial Weekend, I used their Capitol Bike Share program to tool around for the day. With 1,100 bikes in the fleet it is the biggest bike share program in the nation, and the experience was great.
I started in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, zipped down by the National Zoo and along the Rock Creek Trail, biked along the Potomac passing the Watergate Hotel and Kennedy Center For the Arts, stopped to see the Lincoln, Vietnam Veterans and Korean War Memorials, brunch in Georgetown, hung out in the Adams Morgan neighborhood and then back to Columbia Heights. The bike seat adjusted to fit my 6’ 6” height, the three gears worked great, and the bike was a nice enough weight to get up hills with relative ease.
All of this made me think of Minneapolis’s own Nice Ride bike share program (the bikes are identical models, for one thing). Nice Ride currently has 700 bikes at 73 stations, but the program hopes to expand to 1200 bikes at 113 stations during 2012, including widening the program into several locations throughout St. Paul during 2011.
“We work closely with the folks in DC,” says Bill Dossett, Executive Director with Nice Ride Minnesota. “The bikes for both programs—and also London, Melbourne, Toronto and Boston—are manufactured by Bixi Public Bike System out of Montreal."
When asked about some of the benchmarks already reached by the popular program, Bill notes “We are really proud of the 100,000 trips taken during 2010 and the fact that only one bike was lost from the entire fleet. This speaks a lot about how well this concept is working.”
Summer is here and the time is right for dancing in the streets (and jumping on a Nice Ride bike)! They even have a map where you can see all of the locations and how many bikes are available—or apps that let smart phone users do the same thing on the go.
Want to learn event more? Grist reporter Sarah Goodyear has an informative post about Capitol Bike Share and also a nice piece about the bike share program in Hangzhou, China with a whopping 50,000 bikes at 2,050 docking stations.
