Mexico City launched its Ecobici bike-sharing in April 2010, with 1,100 bikes at 85 stations around the city center. The program’s goal is to reduce the number of vehicles that go through the city everyday (over 5 million), while recovering public space, reducing pollution, and improving life quality.
The program got off to a fast start: at least 4,000 people used the program within its first 3 months of operation – for a total of 50,000 trips – and suffered no accidents and no thefts.
Stations are located at about 300 meters from each other, in areas like colonias Cuauhtémoc, Juárez, Roma Norte, Hipódromo Condesa and Condesa. Bikes can be taken for 30 minutes trips for an annual cost of 300 pesos (about 23 US dollars). Registrations can be made online through the system’s website. As of the writing of this post (May 2012), the program boasts over 26,000 subscribers.
Even with the implementation of bike-sharing, Mexico City remains far from a biker’s paradise. Mexico City is notoriously automobile-friendly, and drivers often don’t follow rules that require them to share lanes with bicycles, drive aggressively, drive on sidewalks, drive in the wrong direction on one-way streets, and so on.
To help deal with these issues, Mexico City plans to create designated bike lanes, in addition to adding thousands more bikes to the Ecobici system. Additionally, it has introduced a Sunday bike program in an attempt to hasten the arrival of a bicycling culture in the city.
