The biggest bicycle-sharing program in the US got rolling on Monday, as thousands of New Yorkers got their first chance to ride a network described as a new form of public transit.
The privately financed program called Citi Bike, named after lead sponsor Citigroup Inc, began with 6,000 bikes at more than 300 stations. Plans call for expanding it to 10,000 bikes docked at 600 places in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Riders can now unlock the three-gear, cruising-style bikes from any station, take them for 45-minute rides and return them to any rack.
“We now have an entirely new transportation network without spending any taxpayer money,” an enthusiastic New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.
Photo: AFP
It is one of more than 500 bike-sharing systems around the world. Fifteen thousand people have already signed up for New York’s program, city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn said.
While many New Yorkers already do without cars, Bloomberg’s administration has added hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes and promoted cycling as a healthy and environmentally friendly alternative to driving. Officials see bike-sharing as a big next step.
The bike-sharing roll out was delayed because of problems including damage from Superstorm Sandy, and a woman made off with one of the bicycles on Sunday evening as workers unloaded them at a Manhattan station, police said. Bloomberg said the bike was recovered. Police were looking for a suspect.
Some residents are upset about the bike stations, saying the racks are blocking entrances to their buildings or taking up parking space for a profit-making program. The city intends to split any profits with Citigroup, which is paying US$41 million to sponsor the program. MasterCard is paying an additional US$6.5 million.
“We’re not against the bikes, we’re against them in our park,” said Laura Tenenbaum, one of the sign-carrying critics who came to Bloomberg’s news conference.
Bloomberg said New Yorkers have long had to work around parked cars and other obstacles.
“We have a busy city,” he said. “We like that. That’s good.”
Citi Bike subscribers pay a US$95 annual fee for unlimited rides of 45 minutes. Starting on Sunday, riders will also be able to buy a 24-hour pass for about US$10 and a seven-day pass for US$25. Both allow for an unlimited number of 30-minute trips.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS