Program offers free bike rentals, Euro-style

Volume 20 Issue 8 | July 6 - 12, 2007

By Lucas Mann

If you see a gang of bicyclers patrolling Manhattan on identical rides next week, do not be alarmed. These people will be the beneficiaries of The New York Bike-Share Project, occurring from July 7-11.

At 97 Kenmare St. and another location that will change each day, there will be free 30-minute bike rentals all day long.

“That’s the way it is in most European cities,” said David Haskell, executive director of the Forum for Urban Design, which is co-producing the project with the Storefront for Art and Architecture. “You get the bike for free for the first half an hour and then the price, which is still really cheap, usually about 50 cents per half hour, rises as the trip gets longer. It is to prioritize short trips. We wanted to start from that model and see how New Yorkers would react to it.” In the New York experiment, Haskell said that riders will be asked to only take out the bikes for a 30-minuite period, so there will be no pricing system.

The Bike-Share Project’s main goal is to display this transportation alternative that is already taking off in cities like Paris, which has recently added 10,000 bikes at 750 locations. Along with the free-bike trials, 97 Kenmare St. will house displays of how the program has worked in these various cities. On July 9 there will be a presentation on bike-sharing in Barcelona, Stockholm and Oslo, and July 10 on Pamplona, Lyon and Paris.

Each participant will have the chance to give their opinions when they return their bikes and there will be a video-blog documenting the week’s progress online at nybikeshare.org. On July 11, there will be a display of the results from the five-day experiment, also at 97 Kenmare.

“Our hope is that the idea captures the imagination of New Yorkers and other programs pick up and support the concept,” Haskell said. “We want to show that this is already a reality in Europe and could be a reality here.”

With congestion pricing on everybody’s mind and last week’s papers being dominated by talks of a maxed-out M.T.A., the Forum For Urban Design sees the climate as perfect for the introduction of a cheap and environmentally friendly transportation alternative and hopes this week can spur people toward thinking about a full implementation of the bike-share program.

“I know some people don’t want to commute on a bike in their suit and I know that it’s not appealing on rainy or snowy days,” Haskell acknowledged. “But I have no doubt that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers would take a bike trip as opposed to the cross-town bus.”