Healthy Ride is a public

bicycle sharing system A bicycle-sharing system, bike share program, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share (PBS) scheme, is a shared transport service where bicycles are available for shared use by individuals at low cost. The programmes themselves include bo ...

that serves parts of

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

. Operations started on May 31, 2015, with 50 stations and 500 bikes. The system is owned and operated by Pittsburgh Bike Share, a Pittsburgh-based

501c3 A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 50 ...

, with bikes provided by

Nextbike __FORCETOC__ nextbike is a German company that develops and operates public bike-sharing systems. The company was founded in Leipzig, Germany, in 2004. It operates in cities in 25 countries including Germany, UK, New Zealand, Poland, Croatia, ...

History

Pittsburgh Bike Share was founded in December 2012 and incubated by Bike Pittsburgh. The organization was created due to mounting interest in implementing a municipal bike share system in Pittsburgh from a collection of local leaders: planners at the City of Pittsburgh, business leaders at Walnut Capital, and bicycle/pedestrian advocates at Bike Pittsburgh. In 2013 Bike Pittsburgh raised significant capital from local foundations–including Heinz Endowments, Buhl Foundation, Henry L. Hillman Foundation, Richard King Mellon Foundation, and other anonymous donors–to cover planning and capital costs and match a $1.6 million Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality improvement (CMAQ) grant from the

Federal Highway Administration The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a division of the United States Department of Transportation that specializes in highway transportation. The agency's major activities are grouped into two programs, the Federal-aid Highway Program ...

. This successful fundraising campaign launched the bike share project. Bike Pittsburgh, working alongside leaders at the Department of City Planning, hired Alta Planning + Design to develop a business plan for the program. Alta Planning + Design, in partnership with the City of Pittsburgh Department of City Planning, conducted a thorough community outreach and planning operation and completed the business plan in 2013. In 2014, the City advertised a bid for bike share procurement and system installation. The bid was awarded to S.E.T., an Ohio-based general contractor, partnering with

, a German company with over 20,000 bicycles deployed in bike-share systems worldwide, to provide the system equipment, including GPS enabled bicycles, solar powered kiosks and docking stations, and software to operate the system. As mandated by Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the CMAQ grant requirement, the City of Pittsburgh contracted with a federally certified project management team, CDR Maguire, to manage the implementation. Operations started on May 31, 2015, with 50 stations and 500 bikes. As of April 2019, Healthy Ride had 650 bicycles. As of November, 2018, the system had expanded to over 100 stations In July 2019, the Healthy Bike announced that it will be adding several e-bikes to its fleet. In August 2019, The

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

partnered with the Healthy Bike to provide free 30-minute rides to all first-year undergraduate students and resident assistants.

Pricing

Healthy Ride offers three plans: * Deluxe, a monthly membership for $20. It allows unlimited trips up to one hour (the user is charged $2 per 30 minutes after the first hour of each rental). * Standard, a monthly membership for $12. It allows unlimited trips up to 30 minutes (the user is charged $2 per 30 minutes after the first 30 minutes of each rental). * Pay As You Go, no membership fee, each trip is charged $2 per half-hour. This plan can be purchased at any Healthy Ride station.

History

Pricing

See also