If you did not take our advice about buying yourself a bike for the holidays, be advised you might have a chance to rent one for a short while. The Houston City Council last week approved a contract with B-Cycle to implement the city’s first Bike Share demonstration program. (Video below shows how it works.)
The program is supported by the Houston Climate Showcase grant the city received from the EPA last year. The program will be very limited though in its initial roll-out with only three stations selected in the downtown area, but of course when you are just learning to ride you need a small push before things really start moving.
There is still no word on when it will be launched, nor costs of the program to the users. However, FreePress-Houston did some nice analysis of what rates in other cities working with B-Cycle are currently charging. The closest to Houston, which might be an illustrative example of what we might expect, comes from San Antonio which did a much larger initial roll-out last Spring and seems to get high marks from its users.