Hubway, a bicycle share-system implemented by the City of Boston in late July, makes the city more bike-friendly, some students said.
The system is comprised of 61 stations and 600 bikes throughout the city, including five locations along the Boston University campus on Commonwealth Avenue and one in South Campus on Park Drive, according to the Hubway website.
The bike rentals are broken down into three different memberships— annual, three-day or 24-hour, depending on the frequency and length of a bike rental.
Three-day and 24-hour memberships can be purchased at kiosks, while annual memberships must complete an online form to open an account and can be found on the Hubway website.
After the program launched, annual memberships came flooding in with 1,520 added in the first week, according to the Hubway Twitter account. The Twitter account @Hubway keeps followers updated on local biking events and interacts with their customers.
For those making a quick trip, according to theHubway.com, rides less than 30 minutes are free.
According to The Boston Globe, there are 2,319 annual subscribers as of Aug. 28 and more than 10,000 tourists have signed up for one-day or three-day memberships.
Katie Stack, a recent BU graduate, hopes the biking stations will change the way biking is perceived throughout the city.
“Hopefully this program will encourage more people to bike and in turn encourage drivers to be more courteous to bikers, as well as encourage the city to make itself more hospitable to the biking population,” Stack said.
Similar bike share programs are in place in Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, Tucson, Madison and across Canada and Europe.
Stack predicted that Hubway’s popularity will increase, based off her observations of the D.C. bike share program.
“I haven’t seen this anywhere before,” said Justin Chao, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman. “It was convenient. I took a bike for about five minutes just to get down the street. It was five dollars, and I guess I would use it again.”
Other students said they like that they don’t have to pay for an expensive bicycle or worry about where to park it.
“It’s convenient and cheap,” said Hilmar Gunnlaugsson Nielsen, a freshman in the College of General Studies. “You don’t have to bring your own bike to school. Five dollars per day isn’t that expensive, and I could still use the one I have now to get to one of my classes tomorrow.”
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