Hamzat Sani  |  League of American Cyclists

While he didn’t ride up to Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama showcased the city’s bicycle-friendly facilities during the inauguration last week, giving millions of Americans a glimpse of the bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue. When not occupied by a presidential motorcade or thousands of cheering supporters, those lanes are a steady stream of bicyclists, including many using Capital Bikeshare.

With so many people converging on D.C. to celebrate what some consider “a win for a more multiracial America,” I wondered: how are those facilities and the bike sharing system serving our multiracial cycling community?

To help answer that question, Darren Buck of Bikepedantic recently published his analysis on “Encouraging Equitable Access to Public Bikesharing Systems.” The 107-page report delves into how 20 bike-share programs across the country, including D.C., are working to ensure access to public bike sharing systems in low-income and communities of color.

While bike share systems are becoming a popular idea in many urban areas nationwide, where bike-share programs currently exist there is a persistent truth that they often don’t serve the populations that could benefit the most. Benefits associated with bike-share include:

• Greater transportation mode shift. (Fewer cars, more bikes)
• Neighborhoods w/ less greenhouse emissions. (Cleaner air)
• Lower household transportation expenditures. (Spend less to get to work)
• Increased accessibility to public transit. (Greater mobility without a car)
• Increase in physical activity. (Fewer shouting matches with your scale)

So who benefits from all this bike-sharing goodness? Well, it turns out its mostly well-educated, white users 34 years old and younger.

Why is this happening? Are low-income and minority populations too cool for bike-share? According to the report, there are some clear barriers that make the demographic of bike-share users more homogeneous than we’d like. There are both barriers to bicycling in general and barriers to bike-share use as well. {…}