In addition to being a streetcar advocate, I love biking. When the weather is nice enough, I often ride by bike from my apartment in Clifton down to the office on 4th Street. People say Cincinnati is too hilly for lots of biking, but with bike racks on all city buses so easy to use, it’s a piece of cake to bike down the hills and take the bus up them.
There are a bunch of initiatives in the city right now encouraging greater bike usage. The Cincinnati Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee (Bike/PAC) is one group that’s doing a great job to energize current bikers, and I’m really excited about the planned bike hub in Newport that will serve as a way station and wealth of information for bikers.
But I think we have a lot of work to do toward making biking more accessible to the general public. The New York Bike Share Project, launching today, is a great example of how a community can expand biking services and make it exciting in the process. It seems kind of like a Zipcar (car-sharing program popular in Boston, DC, San Francisco etc) for bikes.
Imagine walking to a sidewalk corner and finding a public bicycle. With a cellphone call or swipe of a card, you unlock it from its bike rack and ride it across town. Once at your destination, you steer to the closest bike rack and, with one more call or card swipe, return the bike to the public network. You pay less than $.50 for the trip, and the bike is once again available for the taking.
With more companies and stores (such as Park + Vine) offering bike racks out front, it would be incredible to have a network of these places where you could hop on a bike for a small charge and get where you need to go. This would be ideal for those who don’t ride enough to need a bike of their own, and really push the message that Cincinnati is a bike friendly city.
And of course, the streetcar will accommodate bikes too.
