Remember the days when you were a kid and you were taught about “sharing” things with others? Well, it seems that now that concept is coming back to modern day times with the idea of bike-sharing. According to a recent article by Time, cyclists are being born everywhere:

In the mid-1990s, when public bike-sharing programs were heralded as a way to curb parking shortages as well as greenhouse-gas emissions, dozens of U.S. cities decided to give them a shot.

Nonprofit organizations in places like Colorado, Virginia and Florida launched fleets of communal bikes that people could borrow for free and leave around town for the next rider to happen upon. There are no locks, no deposits- just bikes to use at your disposal. All you have to do is park it and let the next person use it. Such an idea might generate criticism from skeptics who think that something like this would only encourage criminals. However, last month, Washington D.C. began America’s first high-tech bike-sharing program with SmartBikes.

According to a recent news article,

For $40 a year, anyone can register for SmartBike D.C. online. Then head to any one of the ten locations throughout the city, swipe your SmartBike card, and a computer screen tells you which bike to pick up. After a few hours of going where you need to go, return the bike to any SmartBike location. Other bike sharing programs like SmartBike D.C. have been considered successful in European cities like Paris and Barcelona. Other U.S. cities have tried more low-tech versions, but bikes have sometimes been stolen. Officials said the system is equipped to avoid those issues.

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