Nick Franklin here again.

I was saying to my neighbor on the Super Shuttle from the airport the other day about how ALA should sponsor bike rentals during Annual Conference so that we could get our morning exercise getting to the meetings that way if we choose.   Maybe someone in Conference planning is reading?  I’ll just let the idea hang there until it ripens…

But look! Walking a little distance from the Colorado Convention Center the other day (at Wellington E. Webb Municipal Building, to be exact) I noticed a couple of racks stocked with white bicycles and a vending machine that accepts a  smart card for the release of one of these road bikes for the day.  I guess riders need to bring their own lock and helmet.

Denver is not the least transportation unfriendly city I’ve come across, but it is fairly car-centered.  It’s nice, though, to see such a conscious effort to take things in the other direction by encouraging cycling.   It also encourages participants to think more about how they can share resources and be a bit less isolated in their communities.  Like a library book, a theft of one of these bikes is a theft from the community and therefore  much less tempting.  Besides, the bikes provided for these municipal experiments are always fairly generic-looking.  They get you from A to B, are good for the environment, and cost less too.

Wish it weren’t so cold and snowy, I might have used one.