Times Square is transforming itself into a pedestrian- and cycle-friendly public space. Photo by Lorrie McClanahan.

I wrote yesterday about SmartBike DC, the capital’s new bike sharing program, and its plans to expand dramatically in the next two years.

It looks like New York City is also planning a major bike sharing program. Although their plans are still in the early stages, the New York City Department of Transportation has put out a long feasibility study outlining the benefits of bike sharing, best practices from around the world and what models would work best in New York. There’s a lot in there, but the headline is 89,500. That’s the number of bikes they expect their program to have. 89,500 bikes!

For comparison’s sake, D.C. currently has 120 bikes and is planning to expand to around 1,000. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a lot fewer than the Big Apple.

New York reached its number by looking at successful bike sharing programs from around the world, particularly Vélib’ in Paris, which is widely considered to be the most successful. The calculation of 89,500 is based on how many bikes and kiosks are needed per person and per square mile.

D.C.’s planned expansion, apparently, is using different numbers. For example, the New York plan writes that Paris, Lyon, and London all believe that 28 kiosks per square mile “is the density needed to ensure that users can find a bicycle when they need one and return it easily when they are done.” Imagining that the DDOT wants to cover half the geographic area of the District, it would require 952 kiosks, one hundred times more than the current supply and ten times more than the planned size after expansion. If New York and Paris are right, D.C. isn’t doing enough to create a full-scale bike sharing program.

This is critical. As I wrote yesterday, without sufficient density, bike sharing won’t become a core piece of the transportation infrastructure. In the New York study’s words, “Small programs do not provide meaningful transportation, health, or economic development gains.”

New York is also cleverly planning to place the bike kiosks not only on sidewalks but in what are currently parking spaces and in “underutilized spaces,” such as under highway bridges. This means that the New York DOT sees the bike sharing program as part of a broader planning effort that can reclaim potentially unsafe urban spaces and change drivers’ behavior. That’s definitely an idea that D.C. should steal.

I firmly believe that D.C.’s proposed expansion will make a huge difference in how we get around the city, but the New York report does make me worry that D.C. isn’t investing enough in the program for it to be truly transformative. It would be a shame not to scale the program for success. This is particularly true given that there are already three times more cyclists per capita in D.C. than in New York – this is a good city for bicycling with a large pool of potential bike sharing members. D.C. can–and should–maintain its status as the American leader in bike sharing.

That said, the New York study is only that; there is not yet any plan to implement bike sharing. It is easier to be ambitious when you don’t have to find a line in the budget. Washington D.C. can be proud that it has the first bike sharing program in the United States, that its program is a success and that SmartBike DC will be ten times bigger by 2011.

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