Yellow Bike Project

It was dark when I woke. This is a ray of siunshne.

A Community Cycling "First"

One of the first community bicycle projects in the United States was started in Portland, Oregon in 1994 by civic and environmental activists Tom O'Keefe, Joe Keating and Steve Gunther. It took the approach of simply releasing a number of bicycles to the streets for unrestricted use. Portland's Yellow Bike Project was an amazing publicity success, but proved unsustainable initially due to theft and vandalism of the bicycles. The program was later revised to operate under a more restrictive system. Since then many community projects around the country have attempted similar models and met with varying degrees of success.

The Yellow Bike Project was reported in the New York Times, received editorial condemnation from the Wall Street Journal (an affront to private property rights) and culminated in a nationally broadcast Yellow Bike story on the CBS News Magazine 48 Hours. The Yellow Bike Project provided nearly 400 free bicycles available for unrestricted use in downtown Portland in its first six months. Though The Yellow Bike Project inevitably suffered from theft and vandalism of the bikes, in a broader sense the Yellow Bike Project was an amazingly successful publicity generator for Portland, Community Bicycling Programs and The Community Cycling Center. The Community Cycling Center, which helped to operate the Yellow Bike Project, has since developed its Create-a-Commuter program, which provides 375 free bicycles per year to individuals.

External Links

• Yellow Bike Project
• Yellow Bikes: Version 2.0: The Return of Bike Sharing?
• Portland Journal; Where Trust Rides a Yellow Bicycle
• Bicycle sharing system
• Deleted text from Wikipedia's Portland, Oregon page.
• Commons on wheels
• Dial-A-Bicycle (Rental)
• Community Bike Programs - Bike Libraries - Bike Sharing: Case Studies