Visitors and residents of Boston will have the option of riding a shared bike to get around Boston this summer, Mayor Thomas Menino announced at City Hall Plaza on Thursday.
“The car is no longer king in Boston,” Menino said to a crowd of about 100 bicyclists. “We will have more than 600 bicycles and 61 stations across this great city.”
The shared bike program, named Hubway, is expected to be running as early as this July, Menino said.
Users will have to sign a waver and pay a membership fee, which will range from $85 a year to $5 a day, on touch screens at the stations, Menino said. Rides less than 30 minutes will be free after the membership fee is paid.
Bikes can be dropped off at any of the bike stations spread across the city. However, specific locations of the stations have not been finalized yet.
“We know that they will be in downtown, Roxbury, Allston, Brighton, the South End, but we won’t get to Jamaica Plain initially,” said Nicole Freedman, director of Menino’s Boston Bikes program.
Ten to 15 miles of new bike lanes will be created with the bike share system and the program will be expanded to Somerville, Brookline and Cambridge in the near future, Freedman said.
A mix of grants and sponsorships will fund the $5.9 million program. None of the funding will come from local taxpayers.
A total of $4.3 million has been raised already, including a $3 million grant from the Federal Transit Authority and a $600,000 sponsorship from New Balance, Freedman said.
The Boston program is part of a larger shift in policy at the national level, said Therese McMillan, the deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, at the press conference.
“We have finally recognized bicycling as an equal and critically important piece of transportation in America,” McMillan said.
The system will be run and maintained by Alta Bicycle Share, a Portland, Oregon-based company that is currently operating bike share systems in Washington D.C. and Melbourne, Australia.
U.S. Rep. Mike Capuano (Somerville-D), a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed support for the new program at the press conference.
“These are your tax dollars at work,” Capuano said. “It’s about time biker’s got their share back.”
Scott Thomson of Jamaica Plain, who said he has been biking in Boston for eight years and commutes to work in Beacon Hill by bike, is excited for the bike share program.
“I think it is really thrilling. It’s worked really well in other cities, and I look forward to seeing it in Boston,” Thomson said. “I feel mostly safe biking in the city. I think it has gotten better in the last few years.”
Menino, who was hit by a car while biking in 2008, already reserved the first shared bike.
“I’m gonna be there in July at the bike share kickoff,” Menino said. “I’m gonna ride the first bike out of the gate.”
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