If you have a transit pass in Pittsburgh–a refillable card that costs $1–you can now also use it for free rides on the city’s bike-share system.
“I think there’s a couple of big hurdles that are holding back more widespread adoption of bike share,” says David White, executive director of Healthy Ride, Pittsburgh’s bike-share network. First, he says, someone has to have a credit or debit card and be willing to link it to the system. Second, bike share systems aren’t necessarily well-connected to existing public transit.
The free rides are limited to 15-minute increments, but that’s enough to help fill gaps in public transportation, so someone who doesn’t live or work next to a transit station can more easily reach their final destination (someone can also make multiple 15-minute trips in a day). “It’s trying to make that process a lot more seamless and reduce the friction between wanting to go somewhere, not wanting to drive, but not really knowing what to do next,” White says.
“Around the country, we see that people using bike share do not always reflect the demographics of the city that they’re living in,” White says. “There are people who feel like it’s not for us. My goal here was to say for a lot of these communities that have been traditionally underserved . . . we’re going to make it easy to use the bus pass that’s already in your pocket.”