One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

People who live and work in Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen hard at work identifying where they'd like to see bike-share stations. Photo: Noah Kazis

Residents of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea packed into a room last night to discuss the more than 50 bike-share stations planned to open in their neighborhoods this summer. No one was there to complain — this crowd was there to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

I sat in with a table of nine, where participants uniformly supported bike-share and overwhelmingly believed that the stations should go in parking spaces rather than on crowded Midtown sidewalks. With little disagreement over those broader questions, they dove right into a table-sized map of the area, picking out sites that would and wouldn’t work well for stations.

The workshop, sponsored by Community Board 4, local elected officials and NYC DOT, kicked off with brief overviews from DOT staff of how bike-share works. Streetsblog has already covered most of that, but there were a few new tidbits of information. The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island will each have a small, satellite bike-share system, for example, opening a bit later than the core service area in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Annual members, who would mostly be residents, might also get to take the bikes out longer without paying a surcharge than the tourists purchasing daily or weekly passes.

Everyone at the table I observed was excited to see bike-share come to their neighborhood, so long as the stations are mainly placed in the street. Photo: Noah Kazis

After a Q&A period, the conversation turned to station placement. Each group first discussed what kinds of trips they’d like to see bike-share used for, then whether they’d prefer the bike kiosks to be primarily located on the streets or the sidewalks, and then moved on to individual station locations.

My group was enthusiastic about a wide variety of trips — everyone was asking questions, jotting down notes and snapping pictures with their cell phones — but no one wanted to stations placed on the sidewalk. “It would be physically impossible to do it” given the intense pedestrian volumes in the area, said Christine Berthet, the co-founder of the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition. Agreed a resident named Jeremy, “The sidewalks are just too tight.”

While everyone could name specific locations where there was enough room on the sidewalk — in front of a deeply set-back building or on a rarely-traveled block — as a rule, they agreed that the bikes should go on the street. “Just as long as it doesn’t take away a bike lane,” joked Rick Bell, the executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

When asked to formally vote on whether bike-share stations ought to go on the street in general, the group voted 8 to 1 in favor. The only dissenter, David Dartley (a Streetsblog reader and frequent commenter), said he didn’t care about losing parking spaces personally, but worried about a political backlash.

CB 4 Chair Corey Johnson agreed with the siting consensus, according to Transportation Nation’s Kate Hinds. “[Bike share stations] may eliminate a parking space or two on a residential block, but it’s not going to eliminate sidewalk space for pedestrians,” Johnson said.

At that point, DOT unveiled a map of the district. On display were potential station locations that had come through online submissions, the community board, business owners and BIDs, and by DOT itself. The icons were differentiated by color to note who had suggested the station and by shape to show whether the station would be on the sidewalk, street, or in another location. Each had been vetted by DOT to make sure they met the technical requirements. There were about four or five times as many options as there will be stations.

Green arrows show support for certain bike-share stations and the black arrows show the demand for more locations along the waterfront. Photo: Noah Kazis

Participants got to work labeling the stations they liked with green arrows, those they didn’t with red arrows, and pointing black arrows at places they’d like to add as a new suggestion. The recommendations showed off the cumulative local knowledge in the room.

One person added a black arrow at a new entrance to John Jay College, guessing that students would be heavy bike-share users. Red arrows accumulated at one intersection near the Port Authority Bus Terminal where residents said buses make particularly dangerous turns; green arrows circled the area with preferred alternatives. Only a few stations had been suggested for the Hudson River waterfront; participants strewed the riverside with new suggested locations, especially near tourist destinations like the Intrepid or Circle Line.

Workshops like this will be held in every community district where bike-share is planned. DOT will take the public input from these workshops and put it side-by-side with comments from public officials, local stakeholders, and the operational needs of the system. They’ll likely come back to community boards once a draft of the station placement is available, though the exact schedule of future outreach will depend on the particular requests of each board.

New Yorkers submitted dozens of suggestions for bike-share station locations in Chelsea alone. Next week, local residents are invited to a Community Board 4 meeting to determine where stations will go. Image: NYC DOT

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations — this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk — is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

Last fall, DOT officials said that public comments will help determine where to place bike-share stations. Community boards can say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Manhattan CB 2 last October. The stations have to be spaced appropriately and follow certain guidelines — no stations on narrow sidewalks or in parking spaces on busy avenues, for example — but within those constraints locals will get to choose where the bikes go.

Next Tuesday, the city’s first bike-share planning workshop will take place. Hosted by Manhattan Community Board 4, State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, the event will be an important opportunity for people who live or work in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen to help shape this significant addition to the New York City streetscape. The difference between a bike-share system where most stations are on the sidewalk and one where most stations are in the curbside lane may be determined at these meetings, for example.

After Tuesday’s meeting, the next workshop will be the following week and cover Manhattan Community Board 2′s district: SoHo, Tribeca and the West Village. For a full and up-to-date listing of the workshops, including time and location, head over to DOT’s bike-share timeline.

A challenge to app developers aims to help this Boston bike-sharer plan his route, especially if it's lunch time. Photo: The Fosbury Flop

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in issuing a challenge to software developers: Create three new programs that combine real-time transit, bike-sharing, and even food truck data, in order to demonstrate how transit and bike-sharing complement each other.

Boston rolled out their new 60-station, 600-cycle bike-sharing system, called Hubway and sponsored by shoe maker New Balance, last July. It has been so successful — logging 140,000 trips in just four months — that Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing its expansion to 90 stations and 900 bikes starting next year. But in addition to upping the number of bikes, Boston hopes to make Hubway more useful to its customers in other ways.

The MBTA/MassDOT challenge is really three separate challenges:

• A software application that combines transit schedules and real-time Hubway bike availability to display possible connections between the two modes;
• A visualization of “A day in the Life” of Boston’s transit and bike-sharing systems, possibly along the lines of what Oliver O’Brien has done for London; and, as a bonus,
• The BLT (Bikes, Lunch, & T) Challenge, with the goal of helping “residents and visitors learn about and get to Boston’s food trucks.”

The winners of the first two challenges will each receive a year-long transit pass and a year-long membership to Hubway; all three challenge winners will receive a free pass to area food truck festivals.

Other cities are seizing on the wealth of travel data generated by bike-sharing systems. Washington, DC’s Capital Bikeshare (CaBi) has kept its promise to post individual trip data, opening the door for similar visualizations. New York City’s Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan looks forward to the robust and precise route data her city’s bike-sharing system will yield when it begins operating this year.

Read the full description of Boston’s challenge – and download the applicable data – here.

We will be off for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day next week. Have a safe weekend, and we will see you back here on Tuesday.

This map of bike-share trips in D.C. reveals plenty about cycling patterns in the city, but New York City's data will be far more robust, including exact routes for each trip. Image: CommuterPageBlog via GGW.

Here’s one more reason to get excited about the launch of bike-share later this year: the reams of data generated by the GPS units located in every public bicycle. The Department of Transportation will use that data to inform their bike lane planning, commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan revealed last night.

“It’s going to be amazing to have GPS generated data for all these trips,” said Sadik-Khan. “For planning purposes, it’ll be huge.”

Right now, data on individual bike trips are very scarce. While bike-share trips aren’t representative of the larger set of bike trips, the ability to track exactly where a large set of riders bike and at what speeds could be quite valuable for bike planning. DOT has used taxi GPS data to measure traffic speeds in Manhattan and evaluate initiatives like the pedestrianization of parts of Broadway, and there’s far more that can still be done with that kind of rich data set. Bike-sharing could start to build a similar toolkit for bikes.

The GPS data, which will be owned by the city and made publicly available to the extent possible, will provide even more information than exists in other cities with bike-share. In D.C., for example, there’s excitement about a new data set that only shows which stations Capital Bikeshare riders are traveling between, not their exact routes.

What would you do with bike-share GPS data? Let us know in the comments.

Boston's Hubway bike sharing system will follow its successful first season with a major expansion. Photo: The Boston Globe

When it returns in the spring, Hubway will be expanding, adding stations in Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. In total, the four-month-old bike sharing system will add 30 stations and roughly 300 bicycles — a 50 percent increase, according to The Boston Globe.

Hubway has come out of the gate roaring, surpassing early ridership figures from some of the country’s most well known bike sharing systems, the paper reports:

Its first 2 ½ months, Hubway recorded 100,000 station-to-station rides, significantly eclipsing the pace of similar systems in Minneapolis (where Nice Ride needed six months to reach that mark) and Denver (where B-cycle needed 7 ½ months).

And it seems Boston’s neighboring cities and towns were feeling left out of the bike sharing excitement. Jeff Levine, director of planning and community development in Brookline, told the Globe that the “number one question” he gets is, “When is Hubway coming to Brookline?”

Local news site BostInno credited the system with helping to make Boston more bike-friendly overall. According to writer Lisa DeCanio, despite some lingering ambivalence about biking in Boston, growing enthusiasm cleared the way for the removal of 71 parking spots on Massachusetts Avenue to make way for a bike lane. She called Hubway a “shining success,” noting that even the defending NHL champion Bruins have gotten on board, “with players riding to and from practice.”

Hearing the news, Network blog Boston Biker was cheerfully smug.

Woo! And this after everyone thought the streets would run red with the blood of a thousand dead Hubway cyclists … seems that Boston city streets are not [as] rough and tumble for cyclists as they used to be.

Hubway was funded in part with a $3 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The Boston region’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing the expansion.

Earlier this month NYC DOT set off on a bike-share information tour, giving an introduction to the city’s plans for a public bike-sharing system to every community board in the proposed service area. Bike-share plans got an enthusiastic reception from the Manhattan CB2 Transportation Committee. And it turns out that the full board backs the program too. On October 20, CB 2 voted 41-0 for a resolution stating that the board “fully supports DOT’s new Bike Share program.”

Next up on the bike-share tour: Manhattan Community Board 8. The transportation committee will hear from DOT this Wednesday at 6:30. If you want to bring bike-share to the Upper East Side, you might want to speak up at this community board, where bike improvements seldom have an easy go of it.

After a series of polls showing big majorities of New Yorkers favor expanding the city’s bike lane network, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute has turned its attention to a wider range of bike issues. It turns out that with 58 percent support, bike lanes aren’t even the most popular bike program the city is undertaking. That would be bike-share, which has a staggering 72 percent approval rating (23 percent are opposed).

Literally every demographic surveyed by Quinnipiac expressed majority support for bike-share. Staten Islanders were the most skeptical, but even in the city’s smallest borough, a slight majority of 52 percent of respondents said they support the program. A full 79 percent of Hispanics, and 87 percent of New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 34, support the program.

Enthusiasm was slightly lower for the prospect of putting a bike-share station in people’s own neighborhood; 59 percent of people said they’d like to see bike-share near their home, compared to 34 percent who don’t want one.

Interestingly, far more people said they support the bike-share proposal than plan to use it. Only 45 percent of New Yorkers say they’d use bike-share to get around for short trips. Of course, if 45 percent of the city’s 8.4 million residents actually started riding bike-share, the program would probably be too popular to function.

The number of New Yorkers who support the expanded bike lane network remained essentially constant, with 58 percent in support and 37 percent opposed (a Marist poll, using different wording, found 66 percent support for bike lanes). The Q poll results display the classic NIMBY dynamic, however. When asked whether they want to see more bike lanes in their neighborhood, 46 percent of respondents were in favor and 48 percent opposed. Hispanics, Manhattanites and young people were the groups that showed majority support for bike lanes in their backyards.

• Tonight: Brooklyn CB 2, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, First Floor Board Room, 6:00 p.m.
• Wednesday: Manhattan CB 4, Holland House, 351 West 42nd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Piano Room, 6:30 p.m.
• Thursday: Brooklyn CB 6, Prospect Park Residence, 1 Prospect Park West (between Grand Army Plaza and President Street), 6:30 p.m.

In Brooklyn, the borders of the bike share system will roughly follow these contours. The final service area is still subject to change. Image: NYC DOT

Committing to a “very intensive participatory planning process,” top DOT officials provided a wealth of detail about the city’s plans for bike-sharing at a meeting of Manhattan Community Board 2′s transportation committee last night. Members of the board and local residents in attendance voiced strong support for the initiative.

When DOT selected Alta Bikeshare as the system operator last month, the basic contours of the program emerged: 10,000 bikes at 600 stations spread through an area stretching from 79th Street to Bed Stuy. Last night, DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt presented new information about the service area, how stations will be sited, the system’s pricing and business model, and the public process moving forward [PDF].

Regarding the service area, Orcutt added important details about the bike-share network in the other boroughs. One slide provided the precise borders of the service area proposed by Alta for Brooklyn (right), though the boundary has yet to be finalized. DOT might extend bike-share into Long Island City, he said, giving it a foothold in Queens. Smaller, disconnected satellite systems could also be set up in the Bronx and on Staten Island; Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro has expressed interest in a system for the St. George neighborhood, for example.

Orcutt also shared a list of draft technical specifications for station placement [PDF]. DOT will avoid putting stations on sidewalks narrower than 16 feet, for example, or in the parking lane of avenues with high traffic volumes. Stations will generally be placed close to intersections rather than mid-block and in plaza space with low levels of pedestrian traffic wherever possible.

Beyond those criteria, he said, community input will heavily influence where stations are located, as long as there’s a station roughly every 1,000 feet and at critical locations. “Some communities may want them in parking lanes, some may want them on sidewalks,” said Orcutt. DOT will bring community boards and other stakeholders lists of potential sites with three to four times as many options as will ultimately be selected and let them choose their favorites. The board should feel free to say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” he said. Those planning workshops will take place over the winter.

A sample map of potential bike-share stations in the East Village shows the typical network density of NYC's system. Image: NYC DOT

To help the community board members visualize the station density of bike-share, Orcutt showed a sample map of the East Village. From Houston to 13th Street, east of First Avenue, the map showed 20 stations.

Compared to other bike-share systems, New York’s will be relatively expensive for short-term users compared to annual members. A daily membership will cost $8-10, a weekly pass $20-25 and an annual membership $90-95. “To some extent, the tourists will be subsidizing New York,” Orcutt said. The annual membership, he added, will be “the city’s best deal short of the Staten Island Ferry.”

Though purchasing a bike-share membership generally requires a credit card, Orcutt said that the city is working to develop alternative identification systems for those who lack one, in particular a NYCHA-based group membership. Other membership-based non-profits could also sign up for group members eventually. Housing Authority residents on the Lower East Side, he said, are “close to a great job market and incredible opportunities, but not well served by the subway.” Bike-share could provide better job access for them.

Many in attendance appeared thrilled with the bike-share proposal, and no one seemed to oppose it, continuing the positive public response bike-share has received so far. “This is exciting,” said committee member Florent Morellet. “I’ll be one of the first to try it.”

“If there’s a bad part, it’s that it’s taken too long,” said local resident Fred James.

One resident who had recently moved to New York from Washington D.C. said that there, bike-sharing had improved cyclists’ behavior significantly. “The number of people cycling has increased dramatically and safety has increased dramatically. The number of people stopping at red lights and at stop signs is way up,” he reported.

Photo-sim: NYC DOT

Next week, NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare will begin what promises to be a detailed public outreach process to help plan the city’s new bike-share system. The schedule for the first community board presentations has been posted on the city’s bike-share timeline.

Planning the bike-share network will involve placing about 600 stations within a service area ranging from Bed Stuy to 79th Street. The meetings next week will give an overview of how bike-share will work in NYC and the process for deciding where stations should go. If you want to get involved in the public planning surrounding the most important green transportation initiative underway in the city, these presentations will be a good way to start.

Here are the details:

• Tuesday, October 11 – 6:30 PM–8:30 PM
  Manhattan Comunity Board 2 Transportation Committee
  NYU Silver Building, 32 Waverly Place, Room 705
• Wednesday, October 12 – 7:00 PM–9:00 PM
  Manhattan Comunity Board 6 Transportation Committee
  NYU Medical Center, 550 First Avenue, Alumni Hall B

Boston's bike-share system got points for cleverness and some extra local cred when Brighton-based New Balance was picked as the main sponsor.

In Boston, the Hubway bike-share system tapped into hometown pride with the selection of Brighton-based shoe company New Balance as the sponsor.

In New York, the recently-announced operator, Alta Bikeshare, is looking for a sponsor who wants its name emblazoned on 600 stations and 10,000 bikes covering a big chunk of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In return for all that real estate, Alta is asking for $60 million over five years.

It can be tough to find the right combination of financial wherewithal and favorable public perception that makes the ideal sponsor. So we thought we’d share a few branding possibilities that have crossed our minds here at Streetsblog. Some would be a great fit, others probably not.

Here’s what we came up with, in no particular order:

• Duane Ride
• Apple iBike
• Chase
• Boost Mobile
• 1-800-FLOWERS.com presents: 10,000 public bicycles
• Nike Bikeys
• Subway
• Forest City Bike-share
• Ggle
• PeyserCycles, a division of News Corp
• Nomotorola
• Bloombikes

Who would you like to see sponsor NYC bike-share? Tell us your suggestions in the comments.

Photosim: NYC DOT

For the next few weeks DOT and Alta Bike Share will be setting up bike-share demonstration kiosks where New Yorkers can see how it all works and try out the sturdy, three-speed bikes that will be available at 600 stations once the system is up and running.

The next demo is coming up tomorrow in DUMBO, from noon to 4 p.m., under the Manhattan Bridge archway. There are four more demos scheduled for the next month, with more undoubtedly to come after that. You can see the current demo schedule here.

Meanwhile, the number of bike-share kiosks submitted through DOT’s interactive map is now up to 4,400. Got a favorite kiosk suggestion? You can highlight them on the enthusiastically named f***yeahbikeshare tumblr.

New Yorkers have been flooding DOT with requests for bike-share stations on the agency's new interactive map. More than 3,200 suggestions have been submitted in 24 hours. Head over to the site and let them know where you want a station.

When bike-share goes live next year, stations will be located every few blocks throughout Manhattan below 79th Street, give or take a few blocks, and much of northwest Brooklyn. The exact locations of the stations have yet to be decided, and siting them will be a big task for bike-share planners this fall. DOT is counting on public feedback to help guide the process.

“What we’re really focusing on right now is the central business district and adjacent neighborhoods,” said DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan at a press conference yesterday, “but again, we’re going to be working with communities over the next several months to finalize that program.”

A sample map from bike-share operator Alta Bicycle Share shows how dense the bike-share network might be in Midtown. The specific locations still need to be worked out, and DOT wants extensive community input to decide where. Image: Alta

In Manhattan, bike-share will cover the entire area south of 60th Street and extend north into the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, probably up to around 79th Street. DOT’s bike-share website says that in Brooklyn, DUMBO, Downtown, Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Park Slope will be included in the initial phase of the program.

Wherever you are, though, DOT wants to know where you want to see bike-share stations installed. Within the core service area, they’re organizing a community process to determine exactly where to place individual stations. DOT plans to hold public workshops and work with elected officials, community boards and businesses to ensure that block-by-block, bike-share goes where it fits best.

You can participate in the siting process using this interactive map that allows you to suggest locations and explain why bike-share ought to go there. (Disclosure: This map was produced by a division of OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization.) Already, in the day since the map went live, people have suggested more than 3,200 station sites and submitted more than 13,000 up or down votes on them.

DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow told the Times that the bike-share stations will be placed “with the intent of siting them primarily on sidewalks, plazas and other public areas,” while some will be located “in what are currently parking spaces.” Really, everything is on the table, and a lot is going to be decided at DOT’s public workshops. The station sitings will be made on a case-by-case basis, weighing the local conditions and the public feedback that planners receive.

As for placing bike-share stations outside the core service area, that’s going to be tricky, but DOT is working on ways to do it. Since the program is being run without public subsidy, any station has to help Alta Bicycle Share turn a profit. “They’re paying for the program,” said Sadik-Khan, “so we have to make sure that it connects and is a profitable program.”

Even so, DOT is setting up a path for areas outside Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn that have good locations for bike-share to join the network. “We’re going to be having satellite programs so that people can opt in,” said Sadik-Khan. “I spoke with Borough President Jim Molinaro this morning and he talked about being interested in seeing what could happen with a bike-share system in St. George, around that ferry terminal.” We have a call in with Molinaro’s office to see why he thinks bike-share is a good fit for his constituents and what his plan is to bring it to Staten Island.

If you couldn’t be at Madison Square yesterday, not to worry — Robin Urban Smith brings us the video highlights from the big bike-share press conference with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC business leaders, and progressive politicos.

The scene leading up to today's bike-share announcement. Photo: Ben Fried

In Streetsblog’s unscientific sample of five New Yorkers who stopped to see what was happening, none was concerned about bike bedlam. Every single one of these pedestrians was excited to see bike-share come to New York.

“I knew they were doing this, but I didn’t realize they were doing it right here,” said an excited Melissa Singer, who works in the Flatiron building. When informed that the bike-share station was just for a press conference and might not end up at that very spot, Singer remained positive about the program, saying that it’ll be perfect for people who don’t want to invest in owning their own bike or want access to one all the time. “It’s one of those ‘about time’ things for the city,” she said.

Lionel Mapp III hadn’t heard of bike-share before today, but after a brief explanation said he’d definitely try it on days when there’s heavy traffic. “If people need to go a short distance, it would be better than jumping in a cab.”

Jim Morgan stopped to look while walking his dog along Broadway. He said he’d take bike-sharing for quick trips, such as from Madison Square to Central Park, especially thanks to its low cost. “For 104 bucks or less a year, you can’t beat it,” he said.

“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” said Geoff Jones. He saw bike-share thrive in London and thinks it would be a perfect fit for New York, especially for tourists. “If you come to New York, there’s so few bike rental options.”

There’s no doubt that from now through at least the first few months of operations for bike-share, a cacophony of complainers will have every opportunity to explain what they don’t like about bike-sharing to a receptive media. But the truth is that big majorities of New Yorkers support cycling, and people like Singer, Mapp, Morgan and Jones are always looking for an easier way to get around their city. We’ll see whether voices like theirs get the play they deserve.

One person who declined to give her name had an even simpler review of the new program: “Yay bikes.”

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announces the selection of Alta Bike Share to operate NYC's bike-share system. Standing to the left is Working Families Party director Dan Cantor. To the right are council members Gale Brewer and Brad Lander, and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson. Photo: Noah Kazis

Addressing a plaza full of reporters at Madison Square this afternoon, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced that the city is entering the next phase of its initiative to launch a public bike system stretching from the Upper West Side to Bedford Stuyvesant. The system will be run by Alta Bike Share and consist of about 600 stations with 10,000 bicycles, creating a network of comparable size and density to bike-share systems in cities like London and Paris.

Station density is perhaps the single greatest key to success in a modern bike-share system. The less searching you have to do for a station, and the closer you are to your destination when you dock your bike, the better. As Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak told Streetfilms earlier this year, the underlying principle is “go big or go home.” With this announcement, NYC DOT and Alta have clearly signaled that they are going big. Once bike-share launches, it will change the way New Yorkers get around the city, extending the range of the transit system and adding point-to-point convenience for short trips.

Sadik-Khan said the selection of the bike-share operator also marks the beginning of an extensive public outreach campaign, which will seek ideas from local residents, community boards, and civic leaders to determine where bike-share stations should go. “This is just the start,” she said. “We really want your help in planning the system.” Public workshops will be held throughout the fall, and the bike-share system is on track to launch in 2012, potentially by the summer.

Leaders from NYC’s business community and progressive political landscape hailed the bike-share program as a way to give New Yorkers more transportation options and attract a skilled workforce. Both Kathy Wylde, the CEO of the city’s biggest business lobbying group, the Partnership for NYC, and Dan Cantor, leader of the labor-affiliated Working Families Party, were on hand to back the initiative. Wylde called bike-share “an important contribution to the next generation of what will make New York attractive to talent,” and Cantor said it is “one of those things that we’re going to look back at in a few years and say, ‘What took so long?’”

Asked specifically why cycling and bike-share is progressive, Cantor said: “This is so obvious. This is good for human beings. It’s good for the planet. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It burns calories. It makes you a happy person when you ride a bike.”

Three City Council members who represent districts within the bike-share service area also endorsed the plan: Gale Brewer, Brad Lander, and Tish James. The precise borders of the service area have yet to be finalized, but its general contours will run from the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side to Bed Stuy and Greenpoint. The city is considering ways to expand service to other areas after the first phase of the system is up and running, said Sadik-Khan.

Council Member Tish James, trailed by Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, tries out a bike made by the Public Bike System Company, which will supply NYC. Photo: Ben Fried

One of the defining aspects of the contract is that the system must operate without public subsidy. Alta is assuming all the financial risk of running the system, which is projected to cost about $50 million per year to operate. They expect to turn a profit, a portion of which will be shared with the city. Some revenue will come from memberships, which will be priced at less than $100 for an annual pass and give users access to an unlimited number of trips under 30 minutes, after which additional fees kick in. Daily, weekly and monthly passes will also be available (specific prices have not yet been set, but you can read about the general structure of how membership will work).

Another major source of revenue will be corporate sponsorship, and Alta is now seeking a single sponsor whose brand will go everywhere the bike-share system goes — 600 kiosks and 10,000 bikes.

Judging by the Q&A after the presser, NYC’s bike-share plans will face an uphill battle in the media. A good chunk of NYC’s press corps seems to think the bike-share story is about what might happen once people who don’t normally ride in New York are using public bikes. Will they wear helmets? Will they follow the rules of the road? (Experience in other cities suggests that bike-share users are safer on the streets than cyclists riding their own bikes.) As for providing a new transit option and overcoming the barriers to bike riding posed by theft and walk-up apartments without much storage space — don’t count on a wave of coverage about that.

We’re at the very beginning of the process to bring a world-class public bike system to NYC. This fall will come dozens of public workshops to discuss where hundreds of stations should go. The NIMBYs are already staking out their position, and the press corps is as hungry for conflict as ever. If you want bike-share in NYC to be as good as it should be, get ready to make your case.

Noah Kazis contributed reporting to this post.

Image: NYC DOT

This photo simulation offers a glimpse of what New York City bike-share will look like. At this hour, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and a group of electeds are announcing details of the program — to feature 10,000 bikes at some 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn — at Madison Square.

We’ll have full coverage of today’s reveal later this afternoon.

The winning bid features the hallmarks of the world’s best bike-share systems — there will be many bikes and many stations, spaced closely together so that any kiosk is a short walk from the user’s destination.

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, and a group of elected officials are announcing the selection of the winner this afternoon, and we’ll have a report from the event later today. For now, here are the some key factoids:

• Within the service area, which will stretch from the Upper West Side and Upper East Side to Bed Stuy and Greenpoint, New Yorkers will have access to 10,000 public bikes at about 600 stations.
• Annual memberships will cost under $100. Members will be able to make trips of up to 30 minutes at no charge.
• The stations will be sited with input from local communities, and the City Council will hold hearings on the program.
• The system must operate without public subsidy.

All told, we’re talking about a system that will address several longstanding and disparate transportation-related problems faced by New York City residents: the long walk to the train station or bus stop that could be a short bike ride, the barriers to cycling posed by fear of theft and lack of storage space, the difficulty of getting across town in Manhattan.

Bike-share is going to change NYC’s streets. Stay tuned.

NYC DOT COMMISSIONER SADIK-KHAN AND DEPUTY MAYOR WOLFSON JOIN ELECTED OFFICIALS AND CIVIC LEADERS TO ANNOUNCE SELECTION OF BIKE SHARE OPERATOR

Event:             NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson will join other officials and civic leaders to announce the vendor selected to operate New York City’s bike share program.

Date:              Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Time:              12:30 p.m.

Location:        Flatiron Pedestrian Plaza, Broadway between 22nd and 23rd streets, Manhattan

Visuals:           Bike share station and bikes, which reporters will have the opportunity to try out after the press conference.

The city had previously narrowed down the selection to two teams: one led by B-Cycle, which runs Denver’s bike-share system, and one featuring Alta Planning and the Public Bike System Company, which, combined, have experience supplying and operating bike-share systems in London, Washington, Boston, Minneapolis, and Montreal. We’ll have detailed coverage for you throughout the day.