NYC Turns to the Crowd for Bike Share

Abhi Nemani
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:10:54 +0000
News

New York City is launching a new option for transportation: Bike Share. Instead of hopping into a cab or jumping on the subway, you’ll soon be able to grab a bike from one of the self-service bike docking stations around town. It’s a system that’s gaining increasing popularity in metropolitan areas including Boston, Washington, and London. Essentially, there will be stations throughout the city that have bikes available 24/7 which citizens can check out for around 30 to 45 minutes and return to any other station. Plus, mobile apps show the status of available bikes and docking points at each station. It seems like a smart, green, and actually fun new urban system.

Interestingly, the city has turned to the crowd for input on where to place the stations: http://nyc.gov/bikeshare. Built by our friends at OpenPlans, the site allows anyone to submit a proposed location for a bike share station. You can add a location and then make your pitch of why you think a bike share makes sense there. The site was launched just this week and received over 3,200 suggestions and 13,000 votes in the first 24 hours. This suggests that there’s strong interest from the community in the program and in being involved in the decision-making — a good fit then for crowdsourcing. The city will use those submissions, along with local community engagement meetings, to finalize the list of locations with the goal of one station every three blocks.

Learn more about the project on the Bike Share website, find out more details from one of the developers (including some mashups from the data), and watch the overview video below: