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I ask because I use them quite often in my travels, and I actually find it annoying when a city doesn't have a user friendly bike share system.
I don't use the one in DC often because I have my own bike most of the time, but I can tell you it's VERY popular and quite comprehensive with over 2500 bikes (sure seems like a lot more than that) and 300 stations.
Maybe I should be asking if there are any large cities that don't have a bike share system?
I didn't even know we had a bike share here, apparently it is just starting up. It covers 5 cities right now & SF proper plans to have 3,000 bikes eventually.
Here in the Twin Cities we have a bike share system called Nice Ride which has 170 stations and 1,550 bicycles across Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Like most other places, bike sharing is outrageously popular here. On any given day from spring to fall, you'll see hordes of people riding neon green bicycles all over the city — especially around the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes, the Midtown Greenway, both downtowns, along the river fronts, and in the Como Park area of Saint Paul. If I didn't have my own bike, I'd use it myself!
The system in Miami Beach is huge for such a tiny land area city and it's used a lot. I heard at a recent Miami Beach bike program community meeting (from the city's national bike infrastructure consultant) that DECOBike is the only system in the nation that is financially viable without public funding. I use it as my secondary transportation mode with my feet being my primary means and my car being tertiary.
DECOBike works because it's both effective for residents and tourists alike. Its density of stations puts bikes in reasonable walkable proximation to a majority of the residents and tourists alike. This means that most of stations are in South Beach where the highest density of people and resources are. I think the key to the a successful program is to put the bikes where the most people and resources are and provide the density of stations required to make the system truly successful. The absolutely wrong way to deploy a bike system is to cave into pressure by local low density neighborhoods across a city and put one station here and one station there: so far apart from each other that they don't work as an effective network.
Divvy in Chicago has gotten off pretty well. It has about 300 stations and over 3000 bikes (with more on the way) and is hugely popular, especially around tourist sites. There was actually a good article in the Trib today about not only integrating the system into the surrounding suburbs, but about how the area is close to connecting bike path networks across all three states of the metro area (IL, IN, WI).
Citibike in NYC has 6,000 bikes and 42,000 daily riders. No wonder I can never find a bike near my office in the evening.
I've also used bike share in DC and Montreal. Jersey City and Hoboken are joining forces to develop a bike share system over here, not sure when it'll be available.
Bay Area BikeShare really doesn't seem that popular at all. I've read that the average bike gets less than two rides a day- people here appear to use their own bikes much more frequently. I passed by a BikeShare near Jackson Street in San Francisco not too long ago and only about five bikes were taken. The program is expanding, though, and one can only expect it to become more popular in the years to come.
Very interesting. I didn't know about some of these. The NYC system is very new. I was just there this spring and they stations were just getting ready to open. I wonder if they have any logistics problems there such as no bikes available or no place to return a bike if stations are full etc. They have some huge stations there. I typically bring my own bike to NY, but would like to use the citi bike system next time I'm in town.
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