While The Observer can hardly wait for bike share to get here already, it looks like we’re not alone. Curbed turned up this nifty map that either shows the fallout from a listeria outbreak at the city’s farmers markets or the demand for bike share in the city.
Indeed, it looks like the support for bike share is pretty strong in the neighborhoods the city is thinking of deploying it in, namely Manhattan south of Harlem—though it looks like there’s plenty of interest above that, too—and the inner reaches of Brooklyn.
That vast sea of blue outside these areas demonstrates the potential problems of extending bike share much beyond these areas, with the possible exception of western Queens and the South Bronx. The bigger problem is, presumably, those vast seas of blue also represent the drivers who will be forced to share the streets with the bikes, so having the two sides come to terms could be an uphill climb.
Curbed also turns up some interesting details about what be one of the biggest challenges of bike share anywhere—how to get the bikes back up to the top of the hill, as it were:
DOT has yet to declare a strategy to combat possible negative peak-use effects, but is looking at the solutions used by other cities. In London, trucks are used to redistribute bikes from full stations in the city center to empty ones at the periphery after the morning rush, and vice versa in the evening.
So bike share also means more vehicles on the road. And here The Observer thought it was supposed to be the other way around.
