DC Loves Bikesharing

I grew up in South Florida, a place where it is nearly impossible to get from Point A to Point B without a car.  Public transportation is inconvenient, unreliable, or absent altogether.  Suburban sprawl coupled with crippling heat and humidity and a landscape tailor-made for cars made transit by bike or foot a pretty grueling ordeal as well.  I then moved to a college town in central Pennsylvania and was able to get around predominantly by bus, bicycle, or foot, but not exclusively.  The transit system was designed entirely around the university, so if neither your Point A nor Point B were the campus, your commute became much more complicated.  Cars weren't necessary, but were certainly helpful.

(Image lovingly borrowed from Google Images)

It's been a dream of mine for a very long time to be carless.  Then I moved to DC, a land where owning a car was more often than not an inconvenience and an unnecessary expense.  The car I owned was already paid off, but parking, registration, insurance, and maintenance expenses were ludicrous when compared to how little I would want or need to actually use the vehicle.  Consequently, in March of last year, I did away with my 2003 Ford Focus and signed up for Zipcar.  Several months went by and I'd used the Zipcar service a grand total of ONE TIME.  Meanwhile, I started noticing the city's now ubiquitous red bicycles everywhere I went.  The bikes belonged to Capital Bikeshare, a community bike sharing program wherein you "check out" a bike at one location, cycle to your destination, and check it back in at a station on the other end of your trip.  Convenient and eco-friendly transit could be mine for one low annual fee of $75 (plus half-hourly fees for rides lasting longer than 30 minutes).

I had some reservations at first.  I'm not an avid cyclist and in the past have only ridden a bike for recreation as opposed to transportation.  I was also somewhat fearful of biking DC's hectic streets, but I decided if I was going to be a full-fledged Washingtonian, it was time to commute like one.  I signed up for a membership and not long after receiving my little red "key" in the mail, I joined the red bike fleet.

DC really loves bikesharing.  Here's a little history for you (acquired from the Capital Bikeshare web site):  The District of Columbia was actually the first jurisdiction in North America to launch a bikesharing program.  It was called SmartBike D.C. and offered 120 bikes at 10 stations in the downtown area.  The operation only lasted for two years, but acquired 1,600 members in that time.  Meanwhile, Arlington County, VA had been simultaneously working on plans for a bikesharing system of their own.  Arlington parntered with DC and launched a new system in May 2010, the Capital Bikeshare that exists today.  The program now claims over 1,100 bicycles and 114 stations across the DC-Maryland-Virgnia (DMV) area and continues to expand.

(Image lovingly borrowed from Google Images)

The program is not without its complications or growing pains.  Occasionally you will arrive at your bike rack of choice to find it empty, or the reverse will be true; you will bike to your destination only to find no empty bike slots on that end of the trip.  However, the purveyors seem to be getting better at shifting bikes around for better balance and I find these problems to be issues less and less frequently.  Last September, Capital Bikeshare threw a big bash to celebrate its first birthday.  Over a million rides have been taken since that time and the momentum doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon.  Ditch the car keys, hop on a bike.  It's *so* DC.

(Image lovingly borrowed from Google Images)