Bike Share Gets 3M In Federal Funds, Will Begin In Spring 2011

The Boston Globe is reporting today that the feds coughed up a sizable chunk of money to get the bike share program up and running here in Boston!

The federal government awarded $3 million yesterday to Boston’s planned bike sharing program, giving the city and its partners seed money to purchase the stations and bicycles needed to launch next spring.

The federal award, coupled with $2 million in previously pledged local sponsorships and grants, is enough to purchase roughly 500 bicycles and at least 50 rental stations, said Nicole Freedman, who runs Boston Bikes, the program that Mayor Thomas M. Menino created to make Boston more bike-friendly.

“This takes us over one of the main hurdles with bike share, which is having enough funding to have a launch size that we’re confident will succeed,’’ said Freedman, an Olympic cyclist. Too few bikes and rental stations could doom the program to irrelevancy, she said, like an “MBTA with two stops.’’(via)

I had known for a while that the bike program was having problems (it had missed several deadlines) and was unable to really talk about it, but this is great news. I am disappointed it took so long, but really happy that is is happening.

All to often people complain strongly about the pace of change. They get so entrenched in bitching that they forget to pull their head up once and a while and actually see what is going on. Three years ago Boston was a car choked shit hole that had been rated the worst city in america to ride your bike in (more than once!).

In the last three years we have gone from no bike lanes, to 35 miles of bike lanes, added 750 bike racks, extended bike paths (Neponsett river green way), repaved the melnia cass and southwest corridor bike paths, created Bostons first bike boxes, first left hand bike lanes, all this in two years. A bevy of neighborhood bike groups have sprung up (many of them hosted on this site, thanks guys for choosing Bostonbiker.org!). And soon there will be a bike share.

The downward ark has at least been bent to a horizontal line, and I am confident that in the next few years if this trend continues the line will go up, and Boston will be well on its way toward being a world class biking city.

Every morning I ride in I see more and more cyclists on Boston’s streets. More and more of them are choosing to follow the law, more and more of them are women/children/elderly (all typically demographics that only start riding once a certain feeling of safety is met). I am confident that the bike share program will only push all this along faster.

Hurray bike share, and hurray federal government for putting its money where its mouth is.

What do all of you think? Is Boston really on a path to greatness, or am I full of hot air? Let me know in the comments.

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