Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Pittsburgh was the newest city to announce its bike-share plans this week, when it confirmed the city would add a 500-bike system by the spring of next year.

Kansas City was one of the first cities in the Midwest to launch a bike-share system, when it did so last summer. But soon it will have plenty of company. Image: Missouri Bicycle Federation

But nearby Columbus, Ohio, will beat them to the punch. Ohio’s capital city is planning to add 300 bikes this summer. Meanwhile, Indianapolis’ plan was to roll out its system next month.

The truth is you would be hard-pressed to find a large Midwestern city that hasn’t taken formal steps toward adding a bike-share system.

Both Cleveland and Detroit are studying bike-share. Cincinnati completed a bike-share study late last year, and is now seeking proposals from contractors. Milwaukee is assembling money for a system. Chicago hopes to add 3,000 bikes this spring.

And of course there’s the grandaddy of them all: Minneapolis’ Nice Ride. Launched in 2010, this system currently boasts more than 1,200 bikes. Late last year, the system surpassed half a million trips.

Midwestern cities have been inspired by some of the more spectacular examples on the coasts, according to Eric Rogers, executive director of BikeWalkKC, the nonprofit organization that manages Kansas City’s bike-share system. Kansas City was a little ahead of the pack when it launched Kansas City B-Cycle, with 200 bikes at 12 stations, last summer.

“The last few years a lot of cities, especially in the Midwest, have seen good examples from places like Chicago and Portland and New York and D.C. of a lot of innovative facilities that are out there: cycle tracks, bike boxes, bike-sharing,” he said. “There’s so much more knowledge out there now that it’s easier to develop a solution and pursue it.”

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About seven years ago, when Mayor Mark Mallory came on the scene, Cincinnati was at a low point. To convince the crowd at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Kansas City last week of the gravity of the situation, Mallory started off with a story about livestock.

Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory helped turn around his city's downtown by getting more eyes on the street. Image: Indianapolis Recorder

A little before Mallory was elected, a cow escaped from a city slaughterhouse. (Cincinnati, a historic meat-packing city, was once known informally as Porkopolis.) A search was launched, with police helicopters scouring the city. “They looked for the cow for 11 days,” Mallory said. “This was a sad period of Cincinnati. We just couldn’t do things right.”

The cow anecdote (which Cincinnati officials assure us is true) was actually a gentle way of putting it.

In 2001, four years before Mallory took office, incidents of police brutality led to upheaval in the streets on the city’s north side. The Cincinnati riots, which continued for four days, were reportedly the largest in the United States since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict.

For a long time that period clouded the city’s national reputation. But more and more, Cincinnati is seen as a promising urban comeback story. And Mallory — a strong proponent of walkable development — credits smart growth principles for the turnaround.

“Cincinnati’s like a lot of cities around the country,” he told the conference. “We saw our best times from around the turn of the century to the 1960s. Then, like a lot of cities, we saw a period of decline. We languished for decades. Our biggest problem in Cincinnati is that we had lost our way. We had forgotten what it was like to be a progressive city. We’d forgotten what it was like to be on the cutting edge.”

“I set out to change the way we did business in Cincinnati,” he said. “You have to have dynamic leadership.”

As mayor, Mallory began by addressing the real and perceived crime problem. He added police officers to the street, and he also tried to get more regular people, not just cops, back on the sidewalks. One thing Mallory has done during his two terms is to tear down the city’s enclosed skywalks, one by one.

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