Three months in, riders using Boise's GreenBike program have made almost 5,000 trips on the bikes.
Dave Fotsch is the director of the program. He says almost 2,000 people have used the bikes since the program started in April. GreenBike lets people rent bikes around town, and is meant to improve the environment and users' health.
“Ridership has been good, and we’ve generated about $24,000-$25,000 from membership and ridership," says Fotsch. "But I would like to see higher numbers for both of those categories.”
Fotsch says most of the people who've participated don’t own a bike and use the hourly payment option rather than sign up for yearly memberships. He says the number of bike rentals doubles on the weekends. Memorial Day and the Fourth of July also saw big spikes.
“They’re either coming into town as a visitors or they have driven into town for work or play and they just want to use the bikes to get around,” he says.
There are 15 different stations where bikes can be rented. Only half have financial sponsors.
“If we could sell the rest of them I would be much more comfortable in projecting sustainability for this program,” Fotsch says.
The program keeps tabs on carbon footprint savings from people choosing to ride bikes over driving. Computers on the bikes also say users have burned about 500,000 calories since the GreenBike program began.
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