Chicago is launching its first major bike-sharing program this month and Washington, DC is growing its from 120 bikes to 1,100 bikes.
Back when I was the executive director of a non-profit promoting clean transportation (mostly bicycling) and sustainable development, I thought that bike-sharing could become one of the biggest, most popular, and most effective bicycling efforts across the nation (and even the world). That is, that it had the potential to get the most people biking instead of driving of nearly any other bicycle-oriented effort.
But I did have one concern — that cities implementing such programs would do so on such a small-scale that they wouldn’t be effective.