Thursday, July 16, 2009

Portland to experiment with rental bike system

by Mark Larabee
Saturday July 04, 2009

Think of it as a Zipcar with pedals.

Need to rent a bike quick? Walk up to a kiosk, swipe a credit or membership card and ride away. Just return it there or at another station, kind of like renting a luggage cart at the airport.

That's a far cry from the now-infamous yellow bikes -- the 1990s community bike program that died because of theft and vandalism. Those were free, unreliable and mostly clunkers.

Portland transportation officials are eying about 100 high-tech bike-sharing systems worldwide to see if an investment in public bicycles could be successful in what's already considered a world-class bike city.

The rest of the story

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