“A small start-up near Washington, D.C. has started what it calls ‘the first stationless smart bike sharing program in North America.’ And all it took to get the system up and running was some bikes, U-locks and mobile phones.”
That’s the intro to an interesting story on TheCityFix. It’s an in-depth piece on how three students from the University of Maryland, College Park had the vision of creating a super bike-sharing program on their campus but were thwarted by bureaucracy, and found away to get around the issue of stations (the road block, so to speak) by developing software to let users check out and return communal bikes with text messages. The bike sharing system they developed using this method is called weBike.
Read much more about how the system worked, its front door service, problems it ran into, why it’s so easy to implement, and more technology that’s on the way that could help with similar such programs on TheCityFix: For Bikesharing, Forget Stations; All You Need Is a Phone.
Related Stories:
1. Fighting Bike Theft with GPS in Holland
2. New York City Bicycle Sharing Program to be BIG!
3. London Cycle Scheme “Boris Bikes” Visualized
Photo Credit: weBike
About Zachary Shahan
[...] and universities are looking to change the way people get to campus. Investments in car and bike sharing programs, subsidized transit passes, and online carpooling systems have become much more common in the past [...]