Washington D.C. gets SmartBike bike-sharing program
Washington D.C. is set to become the first American city with a high-tech bike-sharing program. According to the Washington Post, for a $40 annual fee, you’ll be able to pluck a cherry red three-speed from any of 10 (downtown only) bike stations. You can then ride the bike for three hours. Want to ride it for longer? You’ll need to drag it back to an access point and top it up.
It’s a step in the right direction, but being a Berliner, it seems a bit rubbery an execution. In Berlin, there are thousands of City Bikes available, sprinkled liberally on almost every street corner. There’s no actual “stations”: you simply walk up to a bike and call a number on the bike’s bumper, which unlocks it for your use. You can then use it for any amount of time, being charged a low hourly rate on your mobile.
What makes the Berlin city bikes so fantastic is that you can leave them anywhere. They have built-in GPS units: once a week or so, fleets of vans swoop over the city, pick up discarded bikes, and redistribute them optimally. I once had about twenty city bikes I had discarded in front of my apartment building: one day, I came home, and they’d all been picked up.
Simple and perfect. And while Washington’s Smartbike program worries about theft, Berlin’s GPS units effectively prevent the bikes from being stolen, short of using a blowtorch to cut into the unit’s enclosed steal casing. Washington’s solution seems a lot more limiting: as far as the Washington Post says, Smartbike can’t physically track the bikes, so they simply ding anyone who has their bike stolen or damaged on their watch for $550.
It’s great to see American cities experiment with commuter bicycling, but it certainly seems like a sub-optimal solution when European cities have used more sophisticated and successful systems for years.
D.C. Bike Sharing Kicks Into High Gear [Washington Post]
