DENVER—Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood strapped on a bike helmet and took a leisurely ride through downtown Denver with Mayor John Hickenlooper Wednesday, promoting a bicycle-sharing program the secretary called “a model for America.”
“People want a lot of different ways to get around the community,” LaHood said before getting on a bike for a ride with Hickenlooper and other dignitaries. Organizers of Denver’s B-Cycle program say it’s the first large-scale municipal bike-share in the country, with 43 stations and 400 bicycles around the city. LaHood said Minneapolis has a program similar to Denver’s but its on a much smaller scale. Des Moines, Iowa is also considering a bike-sharing program.
LaHood said he expects cities around the country to copy Denver’s program, which began in April.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity for Denver, as I said, to be the model for the country, which I think it will be,” he said.
LaHood was in Denver to speak at a round-table on energy and climate change. He rode a bicycle a few blocks from a news conference about the bike-share program to an opera house where the round-table was happening.
The bike-share is supported through membership usage fees, with people paying $5 for a day or $65 for a year. Riders can only use the bicycles for 30 minutes at a time and then they have to drop off the bikes at a B-Cyle station.
The bikes themselves were purchased through grants and donations, said Brent Tongco, a spokesman for Denver Bike Sharing, which operates the B-Cycle program. Tongco said the plan is to expand to 50 stations by September and then 100 by sometime in 2011.
Mayor Hickenlooper said the idea of the program is to make transportation “multimodal.”
“Oftentimes when you come in on transit, a bicycle is the perfect way to get to your office,” he said.
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