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Houston’s booming bike-share system is reshaping a car-centric city

https://www.fastcompany.com/90340216...r-centric-city

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- For a bike-share system, annual ridership growth of around 10% is good. That’s what Motivate, the largest bike-share provider in the U.S., touted as its across-the-board growth metric for its seven systems in 2017. If ridership changes across bike-share systems in the U.S. from last year to now were mapped, Houston would pull the whole chart out of alignment. The local system, BCycle, which is run as a nonprofit, saw an over 65% increase in trips taken compared to this time last year. Much of that is due to the fact that last year the system doubled in size to reach more riders.

- In 2016, Houston BCycle secured a $3.5 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration, which was delivered through the Texas Department of Transportation to fund the system expansion. That year, the system was still tiny, with 33 stations and just over 100,000 annual trips. Now, the number of stations is up to 90, with 38 left to be rolled out through the grant funding. Last year, annual ridership hovered around 165,858 trips, and just a few months into 2019, BCycle is projecting, based off current numbers, that the number of rides this year will top 250,000.

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