Originally Posted by
wilfried
At the risk of going on a New York centric tangent, last year, New York City introduced bike share, after having installed hundreds of miles of bike lanes. Bike share is limited to rides under 30 or 45 minutes (depending on rental plan), after which there are additional escalating charges. When they announced it, there was big hue and cry, "OMG, a four hour bike rental will cost $77! What can you do with just half an hour?" It turns out, quite a lot. You pick up a bike at one station, ride a mile or two, drop it off at another station, do what you went there to do, then pick up another bike if you need to, and go on your merry way. Bike share use peaked at over 44,000 rides a day, and there are almost 100,000 annual members. Bike share created thousands of cyclists simply by making cycling easy. It eliminated the need even to own a bike in order to ride a bike get around town. Bike share may or may not be useful to you for commuting, depending on where your workplace is, but it can be used for lots of other things, and whatever the destination, getting people to get there by bike is a good thing.
San Francisco recently launched a similar bike share, well, technically the "bay area bike share" but I have only used it in SF. I think the same 30 minute criticism came up in SF from many I talked to (including myself), but the reality is for simple transportation this is just fine, ASSUMING that there is a station close to both ends of your destination. That last part is the clincher - the SF network for bike share is pretty limited to a couple neighborhoods, greatly limiting where I can actually go. If they do start expanding to more parts of the city, they may well need to increase the 30 minute limit a bit to allow going between some areas. That said, even with the limited network its useful to me to run errands from work or go go meet friends for lunch or after work, or as part of a multi-modal commute on days I don't bike my full 17 mile ride (bus to a bikeshare bike).