Americans are falling in love with bike share

BAD NEWS FOR the cool kids who depend on their sweet fixies for cultural cachet: Cycling has hit the mainstream. According to a report just released by the National Association of City Transportation Officials, residents and tourists in US cities took 35 million bike-share trips in 2017, up a whopping 25 percent from the year previous.

US riders took 35 million bike-share trips in 2017,
a 25 percent increase over 2016, as the shared
rides spread to more and more cities.

Today, there are more than 100 bike-share systems across the country, operated by eight major companies, NACTO reports. They are, of course, in the most densely populated cities, like New York, which alone accounted for 40 percent of 2017’s trips, and Washington, DC. (It helps that those cities’ public transit systems have had a rough few years.)

“We’re seeing bike-share, in the densest, most populated cities, become part of the urban fabric,” says bike-share operator Motivate's CEO, Jay Walder. (Motivate runs popular systems in New York, California’s Bay Area, Chicago, Portland, and other cities.) “It’s no longer a niche or alternative, but a fundamental part of that.”

Read the story by Aarian Marshall from Wired - “Americans are falling in love with bike share.”