the French capital is making for its massive municipal bike-sharing program that he decided he had to get New Yorkers interested in the possibility of launching such a project here.

more on the background of bike share nyc.
2011-09-14: this is awesome. this will do more for tourism and quality of life in nyc than pretty much any other change in the short term.

With this announcement, NYC DOT and Alta have clearly signaled that they are going big. Once bike-share launches, it will change the way New Yorkers get around the city, extending the range of the transit system and adding point-to-point convenience for short trips.

This will be so amazing.

It will still be months before they are available for rent, and a few days before their precise locations will be revealed. But the 10K bicycles in New York’s much anticipated bike-sharing program have a name: Citi Bike.

2013-07-01:

The credit card reader is fiddly and slow, and has one of those punch screens. you know, “touch” screens with such terrible recognition you need to hit them hard. getting the bikes out of the locking mechanism works 80% of the time. Most bikes are in good shape, with the occasional flat tire. i’d estimate less than 5% of bikes are not in working order. the ride is pretty smooth and it is easy to adjust the saddle height. distribution of stations is decent but could be improved by making each station half as big and putting them into twice as many locations. a maximum walk of 2 blocks would be ideal and would lead to much more usage.
2013-12-05: crucial: a station within half a block. nyc has a ways to go there.

If you want to have a great bike-share program in your city, a few factors are key

• Lots of densely situated stations, ideally no more than 325m apart
• Many bikes (10-30 per 1000 residents in the coverage area)
• A sweeping coverage area that’s more than 13km2
• Solid, usable bikes with hardware that discourages theft
• Easy-to-use stations and payment systems

2014-10-28: 12k bikes (up from 6k) and 705 stations (up from 330) make NYC still the biggest in the us, but only 20% of chinese cities: Wuhan has 90k bikes, and Hangzhou has 60k bikes.
2016-10-19: Citibike essay

When Jay Walder became CEO of Motivate, the parent company of Citi Bike, in 2014, he overhauled the foundering NYC bike share system and turned it into a well-established, fast-growing alternate mode of transportation. By the end of 2016 Citi Bike will have more than 600 docking stations and 10K bikes. In 2015, the bike share program logged over 10M total rides. Here, Walder discusses how, as a means of transportation, a bike share network better serves 21st century demands for movement around the city, and what needs to be done to make Citi Bike an equitable piece of city infrastructure.

By mapping and sharing individual ride data, while actively maintaining system distribution, wide-ranging riders reclaim and forge new desire lines of movement and interaction across the city. The open platform of Citi Bike data has spawned a Citi Bike NYC Hackers forum: an online community platform that engineers the generated data to reveal how the network is behaving. A heightened understanding of the city in motion can help satisfy personal transit needs — for example, to engineer real-time notifications when a certain station has available bikes or docks. This kind of hands-on participation is more than just avoiding jams by passively signing onto a car-traffic app. Directly participating in the bicycle system’s optimum function and interconnection, while using virtually no fuel and occupying only a tenth of the space that a car would, each cyclist rebalances the city’s energy and movement equation, and contributes to empathy on the street.

2018-07-03: Lyft acquisition

Lyft’s announcement nods to how the deal could work out for cities; taking over all those contracts with city halls should further reign in the notion that the ride-hailing company is a rogue operator. “Bringing together Lyft and Motivate will accelerate our collaboration with cities and deliver even better experiences to our passengers and riders”. As ride-hailing runs up against the limits of road congestion (maybe even contributing to its increase), transportation watchers are waiting to see what happens now that both of the 2 major ride-hailing companies have skin in the bikesharing game.