Kansas City tries a pilot bike share program

While Dayton waits for the $4 million paddle boat run, Kansas City is jumping ahead with a small Bike share program.

The pedaling population of Kansas City is expected to increase with the arrival of a bike-sharing program that has been a success in other cities.

Ninety sturdy bicycles will come rolling into downtown today to inaugurate B-cycle, a program intended to make it easier for people to get exercise while reducing automobile pollution.

The bikes will be parked at 12 docking stations sprinkled throughout downtown and will be available to anyone with a credit card.“It’s a self-service bicycle rental system,” said Eric Rogers, executive director of BikeWalkKC, an organization promoting B-cycle. “The idea is basically like Redbox, but for bikes.”

via Bike sharing rolls into Kansas City – KansasCity.com.

And of interest- one of the sponsors is a health care organization- Blue Cross, Blue Shield.

For a nice review, explanation and photos: http://maniger.blogspot.com/2012/07/one-more-step-kansas-city-b-cycle.html

I’m not finding a price for the system, but when I was first investigating Bcycle for Dayton the cost was about $3,000 per seat. So KC probably came in around $300,000 for their small starter system.  In the post above- you’ll notice that the bikes are being sponsored by local business advertising as well.

Also- the Wikipedia entry for bike share has really improved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system

Now that Premier is trying to cram 1,000 people into a building at 2nd and Main- maybe they might realize that adding a bike share system could save time, money and parking issues for employees shuttling between the office tower and MVH main campus.

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