DC Capital Bikeshare

My wife and I recently spent a few days in Washington, DC. Nearly a decade ago we spent 3 years living in the DC, and it has become one of my favorite cities in the country. I always loved how open, green, and flat it is for a real metropolitan area. Living close to the office and downtown, we used to walk around the city a lot and I enjoyed how easy it was to get around without a car.

On this trip, we tried out the new (at least to us) Capital Bikeshare program. For $8 each for a 24 hour period, we could take as many 30 minute rides as we wanted on the bikes spread around the city. It was a fabulous way to get around! The city has really invested in bike lanes to make traveling by bike safer — which we really appreciated. It just took a few seconds to unlock the bikes from their dock — and then we could head out to wherever we wanted to go.

I really appreciated being able to get across town in 10 or 15 minutes and get a little exercise at the same time. It was much more pleasant than being stuck in a car — and probably nearly as fast! There was seemingly a station of bikes every few blocks, so we rarely had to walk far to find one and could almost always park near our destination.

Seeing people commute around the city on bikes and Bird scooters (which I don’t have any experience with yet, since they haven’t arrived in my part of LA) you can really see how the future of urban transportation could be changing. When you stop assuming that cars are the only (or even the best) way to get around — so many new possibilities emerge.

It was fun to get a glimpse of this in one of my favorite cities. I’ll be curious to see how these changes in transportation play out in cities around the world in the coming years.

Originally published at jeffkeltner.com on July 24, 2018.