Bay Area Maps Out Bike-Sharing Effort

[phantom power]

The San Francisco Bay area, long a center of cycling aficionados and Zipcar enthusiasts, is about to play host to a $7 million pilot bike-sharing program that will blend the two popular commuting alternatives.

The largest pollution-control agency in the San Francisco Bay area is joining forces with several local jurisdictions and transportation agencies to pay for the program, whose aim is to reduce some of the tailpipe emissions that are responsible for more than half of the air pollution in the nine-county region.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management district, which has the job of improving air quality in the region around San Francisco, said Thursday that the program calls for strategically locating up to 100 bicycle kiosks with a total of about 1,000 bicycles to provide commuters with an alternative to single-occupancy cars, particularly in traveling to and from urban transit centers.

As a sometime bike commuter myself, I will be interested to see if this experiment, focused in the suburban communities between San Jose and San Francisco, will add to the current army of two-wheeled workers who already fill the bicycle cars on rush-hour commuter trains.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/bay-area-maps-out-bike-sharing-effort/