Boston Transportation Department Announces New Bluebikes Expansion
Mayor Marty Walsh and the Boston Transportation Department have announced planned sites for over a dozen new Bluebikes stations, which will expand the city’s bikesharing network into West Roxbury and Mattapan and add more infill stations in high-use neighborhoods like the South End.
“By the end of 2019, Boston will install more than 50 new stations,” according to a city press release, which notes that this year’s expansion will put 85 percent of Boston’s residents within a 7-minute walk of a Bluebikes station.
Bluebikes ridership has broken records numerous times this summer, as the system has also added new stations in Everett and Somerville as well as in Boston.
The system broke a major milestone on Tuesday, June 4, when riders took over 10,000 bike trips on the system in a single day.
In the past two months, that single-day ridership record has been broken several more times, most recently last Thursday, when Bluebikes users took 13,203 bike trips.
The City of Boston’s fiscal year 2020 budget, approved earlier this summer, earmarked $1 million for Bluebikes expansion. The funding for the Bluebikes expansion largely comes from fees on app-based ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft, which charge an extra 20 cents per ride to support municipal and state transportation projects.
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