Bike Sharing

For your viewing, here's the animation produced by Transport for London explaining how to use Barclays Cycle Hire -- the 570-station bike-share system that launched about two years ago. There's a lot to cover in a little more than four minutes: when bike-share is useful, how to get a membership, what not to do with your bike, how to handle a bike that needs repair, and so forth.

Last week, we asked you to write questions for Navin Narang, an executive with First Pacific Holdings, the company that owns Bike Nation.  Bike Nation is the company that will bring 4,000 bikes and 400 kiosks for Los Angeles' first official bike sharing system over the next eighteen months.  Barring any changes, L.A.'s collaboration with Bike Nation will be the second largest bike share system in the country, trailing only the mammoth system coming to New York this year.

The Department of Transportation is currently going around to community boards and presenting preliminary maps of bike-share locations. While the map for the full service area isn't finished yet, the details that have come out so far are pretty exciting.

Following the surprise announcement last Sunday that Bike Nation and the City of Los Angeles were embarking on a public-private partnership to bring a 4,000 bike bike share system to Los Angeles, people have had a lot of questions. Who is Bike Nation? Who is Navin Narang, one of the founders of Bike Nation that has been the spokesperson for the project. How in the world are they going to pull this off in the next 12-18 months?

In an announcement that caught even some CicLAvia organizers by surprise, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced this morning at the "CicLAvia opening" that CicLAvia partners Bike Nation will establish a permanent footprint in Los Angeles this December.  The cost to the city will be minimal, as Bike Nation promises to pay for all of the 4,000 bikes and 400 kiosks coming to Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Venice Beach and Westwood.  Bike Nation estimates it could take a full year to complete the installation.

The next CicLAvia is a week from Sunday, April 15.

Will Los Angeles County have an integrated bike share system in the next five years?  Metro is taking the first steps to become a coordinator for bike share efforts already underway so that L.A. County could have one integrated bike share program instead of many local bike share systems.

(Streetsblog has no formal position on Occupy L.A., but we do find the role of bikes and a bike share program in this local branch of the national phenomenon very interesting. To that end, we have partnered with our old friend Roadblock to provide coverage of how the program is going and what if any lessons were learned.  As part of this partnership, we can work with donors to provide a small tax deduction for any donations to Roadblock's bike share program- DN)

"They poison our air, water, land, bodies, mind and dreams," reads the sign held by a member of Occupy L.A. as thousands of bicycles shoot past. Many of the riders ring their bell, pump a fist, or stop to engage the protester as he stands in the streets and sidewalk in front of City Hall during last Sunday's CicLAvia.