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Improvements for Cyclists

Cycling is an excellent form of exercise, can be instrumental in pollution reduction, and is increasingly popular. From 2014 to 2017, the number of cyclists in the United States increased from forty-three million to forty-seven million, and from 2014 to 2018, the number of bike-sharing programs nearly doubled.25 The increase in the number of cyclists can be attributed to the rise in bike-share programs, which allow riders to commute by bike without having to own their own, and offer designated bike parking spaces.

The “bike-share boom”26 has been an international phenomenon. The first version of it was in Amsterdam in 1965, but was ultimately shut down after bikes were stolen and damaged. Thirty years later, in 1995, Copenhagen created a bike-share program, though it had the same problems. A year later, a system was invented at Portsmouth University in the United Kingdom to address the problem. Portsmouth’s system makes users swipe individualized magnetic stripe cards that allow the bikes to be tracked and their users to be known. In 1998, Rennes, France, became the first city with a citywide bike-share program. Shortly after, there was one in Lyon, France, and then they began to boom in big cities: Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Washington, DC; Montreal, Canada; Hangzhou, China; Mexico City, Mexico; Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and elsewhere.