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New York City is interested in bikes for public use without a connecting station: the first US metropolis began testing Friday in remote areas that are not covered by the Citibike shared bike service.
150 bikes were deployed on Friday on the Rockaways Peninsula, near JF Kennedy International Airport and very busy in the summer for its wide, sandy beaches, the city government said in a statement.
In late July, the two companies selected for this phase of testing – Pace and Lime, a company in which Uber and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, have invested – must have in this area some 400 bicycles use apps on smartphones, most priced at a dollar for half an hour.
In the coming weeks, further tests are planned with four companies in total, including JUMP, recently purchased by Uber, and Ofo on Staten Island, the island connected to the rest of New York by a bridge. road and a ferry. , but it does not have a meter; in a Bronx university area, and near the popular beaches of Coney Island, Brooklyn.
These bike sharing services without connecting terminals are expanding worldwide, encouraged by the investments of Uber, its competitor Lyft and other companies that develop transportation vehicles based on applications for smartphones.
Several cities like Seattle, Dallas and Boston traveled to New York.
One of the main problems of these bicycles is parking: in the absence of stations to leave them, people usually park them anywhere, or stack them in the most places visited, which contributes to their rapid deterioration.
The Mayor of New York stated that he would evaluate the experiment to measure "the safety, availability and durability of bicycles".
The tests will be developed in areas where the CitiBike public bicycle service, with terminals or parking stations in the style of those in cities like Paris or Barcelona, is non-existent.
CitiBike, launched in 2013, popularized cycling in the financial capital of the United States: the service now has about 145,000 subscribers a year for the use of 12,000 bikes and 750 stations or coupling structures, concentrated in Manhattan and the neighboring neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn.
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