Public bike sharing is one of our favorite solutions to cutting inner-city congestion while providing for carbon-free modes of transportation. Services such as Velib and Smartbike have proven to be a popular and effective way to reduce our reliance upon cars, so we were excited to hear that Freewheelin will be bringing 1000 bikes to this year’s Democratic and Republican Conventions!
Created as a partnership between the healthcare provider Humana and Bikes Belong, a nonprofit dedicated to “putting more people on more bikes more often”, the Freewheelin program will set up over a thousand bikes at hotels and convention centers in both cities. Once the conventions have wrapped up, solar powered bike kiosks will be installed, which will work in much the same way as the extremely successful bike sharing programs in Europe. Instilling both conventions with a means for clean green transportation is a great opportunity to put public bike initiatives on the map, and hopefully will inspire people to trade their carbon laden commute for an easy breezy bike ride.
There was a post on dailykos.com saying that the security people wouldn’t let these bikes around the Pepsi center last week when they were supposed to be set up. They’re afraid people will use them to make barricades and protest.
http://www.coloradoindependent.com/4381/no-room-for-bikes-at-the-greenest-convention-in-history/
Great idea, too bad it is not allowed to be used.
As anyone seen these around Denver? I was at some of the Denver Democratic Convention events and I was trying to find out where the sign up was.
I can just see the bikes going down a storm with all those oily republicans