Residents Get First Peek at Proposed Bike Share Locations: [POLL]

Dozens of residents previewed the city's at a community outreach workshop held at St. Francis College in Downtown Brooklyn Thursday night.

Sponsored by the city Department of Transportation, which along with a private company, Alta, will run the pilot project, the session gave participants a sneak peek into what the bike share program will look like.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, the event revealed where Brooklyn's portion of 600 city bike share stations might be located.

So, one might ask, where exactly will the city's new modular bike stations be placed in the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Clinton Hill, Cobble Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Park Slope and Prospect Heights?

The tentative answer, according to maps provided by DOT: Almost everywhere.

In the interest of coming up with the most options for the bike stations—which include racks and a payment kiosk that can be placed either on the street or sidewalk—city planners came up with a surplus of locations suggested by residents and business owners.

In Fort Greene, that list includes Fort Greene Place and Fulton Street, Dekalb Avenue and St. Felix and Hanson Place and S. Oxford Street.

Clinton Hill has its share too, including Clinton and Greene avenues, Washington and Lafayette avenues and Clifton and St. James place, along with many others.

"It isn't going to replace the MTA. It isn't going to replace cars," said Brooke McKenna, who led one of the breakout groups at Thursday's workshop for DOT. "Bike shares merely give people another transportation option."

At the event, DOT gave the details on how the city's bike share program will work.

Annual memberships that allow users unlimited access to bikes will cost $95 to $100. Weekly memberships will be $20 to $25; 24 hour usages, $8 to $10.

To access a bike, participants in the program must use a credit card at a kiosk located at the share location. A credit card free option, targeting residents of public housing, is in the works, according to DOT.

Workshop participants—even those who own their own bikes—seemed mostly pleased with the specifics of the share program.

"It's perfect because if I feel like biking into work in the morning and have drinks after work, I can just drop it off," said Brooklyn Heights resident Trammell Hudson, who regularly commutes over the Brooklyn Bridge to his job in Manhattan.

Others were concerned about specific bike locations, including CB2 Transportation Committee member Ursula Hahn. 

"To me, it's folly," Hahn said in regards to two planned bike share locations, the first on Adams Street and the second in the median along Tillary Street—both placed near the pedestrian and bike entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

According to DOT, planners will use feedback gathered from Thursday's workshop to come up with a final proposed map of locations for the pilot program, which in turn will be presented to community boards.

The bike share program, modeled and run by the same company that launched similar initiatives in Washington, D.C., Boston and London, is expected to begin in summer 2012.

Though DOT employees loaded the workshop with specifics regarding the program—right down to the specific safety instructions written below the handlebars of each bicycle—some major effects of the bike share initiative remained unclear.

For example, planners still do not know exactly how many parking spaces for vehicles will be removed as a result of the program. However, with 600 citywide proposed locations on sidewalks and city streets, it seems likely that dozens of spaces will have to be elminated.

And as the clock ticks down to the , and with stalled in Albany, that seems likely to be unwelcome news to .