(My apologies in advance to Paul Revere ...) The bicycles are coming! The bicycles are coning!
It's supposed to be ready to launch by mid June, and it looks like it will be limited to downtown/River North at the outset, but a bike-share program will be launching/expanding in Chitown (I say expanding as this picture is from an existing small scale operation that already exists downtown).
It seems like such a win-win-win situation (that's one win for reducing pollution, one for increasing overall fitness and health and one for reducing congestion for those still driving), but there are some concerns -- it's taken the city many many months to launch it, it's still going to cost users money ($75 for a monthly membership or $7 for a half hour ride), a stolen bike (in a city fighting an increase in crime) will cost $1200 to replace, it will potentially unleash hundreds more folks who won't obey traffic signals like they are supposed to, and the ability to use it will be restricted to the location of docking stations (and my 'hood seems to be without them).
Darn it -- I had really hoped to have more wins than concerns (and I'm not touching the concerns about it being for whites only, as addressed in the article below).
Oh well -- time will tell. With a 25 year high school reunion coming up next year where I'm hoping to be less round than the last one I attended five years ago, I'm hoping that I'll be able to take advantage of something from this program soon enough. Time will tell ...
BRING ON THE DIVVY BIKES:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-bike-sharing-divvy-0425-20130425,0,6789207.story
UMMM ... BUT OPEN TO ALL NOT JUST TO WHITES, RIGHT?:
http://gridchicago.com/2012/bike-share-not-white-share-can-chicagos-program-achieve-diversity/
FOR ALL THE LATEST DETAILS, HEAD TO THE SOURCE:
http://share.chicagobikes.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment