After a quiet start last year, the second annual New York Bike-Share Project kicked off an expanded program on July 10 that included depots at four sites downtown with 30 bikes in all, available at no charge for a half-hour spin from rack to rack. The stations were located outside City Bakery near Union Square, at Birdbath Bakery’s two branches in the East and West Villages, and at Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street, and attracted steady traffic, according to volunteer staff from the Forum for Urban Design, which co-produced the project with the participating locations.

The five-day pilot program was the latest development in the ongoing campaign to increase bike ridership in New York. Successful municipal bike-shares abroad have paved the way for a bike-friendly city, one where thousands of bicycles stationed at hundreds of racks would offer residents a practical alternative to the automobile—a vision long shared by local groups like NYC Bikes and Transportation Alternatives, both sponsors of this year’s trial.

Some of the challenges inherent to that vision have already arrived stateside. This month’s bike-share follows the announcement last spring that Washington, D.C. would introduce a European-style SmartBike of its own. That rollout, however, is behind schedule: There’s been difficulty integrating the new electronic kiosks with existing infrastructure. “I’d like to say we’ll be up and going in two weeks,” said District Department of Transportation’s Jim Sebastian, “but I’ve been saying that since May.”

In a shift away from Mayor Bloomberg’s public skepticism about the feasiblity of bike-sharing in New York, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has recently signaled a greater commitment to exploring the idea. On July 7, NYC DOT issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for companies or organizations that could initiate and run a large scale program.

Forum for Urban Design executive director Lisa Chamberlain hopes the current experiment can prove the practical value of bike-sharing for New York. And it might do just that. The program attracted a daily record of more than 60 riders on Saturday, July 12. And Chamberlain reports that one man stopped to inquire about the rack on First Avenue, telling volunteers he was late to a meeting on the West Side. He grabbed a bike, sped westward, and deposited it at the Seventh Avenue Birdbath, arriving at the office with minutes to spare.