Spring Break
Mayor supports bike sharing
Mike Hess
Issue date: 1/25/08 Section: News
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The event was held to promote the idea of a bicycle share program in Philadelphia. Nutter, Representative Babette Josephs and Alex Doty, the executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, spoke on the importance of such a program.
Doty said that the city has 225 miles of bike lanes, that 99 percent of SEPTA buses had bike racks, that biking has increased six percent in the last 17 years and that bikers in Philadelphia travel 260,000 miles on a daily basis.
Bike sharing decreases congestion, improves the air, decreases greenhouse gasses, and will decrease car use, but not mass transit, according to Doty.
Nutter, who entered the room to a standing ovation, agreed, and added, "Bicycles relieve traffic congestion, increase health [and] lower household costs; they do not have exhaust."
Nutter said ideas like this were to his goal "to reduce the city's carbon footprint." He also spoke about implementing administrative changes to make his government more equipped to deal with environmental problems.
"We're trying to make Philadelphia the No. 1 green city in America," Nutter said at the conclusion of his speech.
Bike sharing makes biking in general safer as well, according to Doty.
"If you double the number of bikers on a street, crash risk falls for each bicyclist by 33 percent," he said.
There were also three guest speakers who were experts on bike sharing, including Gilles Vesco, the vice president of Velo'v, a bike share program in France.
Vesco spoke about Velo'v, or "Love of Bikes" in English, as well as the "prerequisites" of a successful bike sharing program.
He said that the idea for bike sharing has been around in France for a long time but the city will need "a credible technological solution to secure parking the bikes in public space. You need a strong political will to take the risk to put a station at every street corner, and you need social expectation."
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