Boston Bike Sharing and the I-Lab
Last week, Boston residents and media outlets applauded the city’s new Hubway bike sharing program, which allows residents to borrow a bike for a certain amount of time from any one of 61 bike stations.
According to an article in the Boston Herald, “rentals will cost $5 a day or $85 for annual memberships. Already 700 individuals have signed up for annual memberships. The system uses “swipe card” technology that allows users to rent bikes from one station and return them at another across the city. Typically, there will be about 10 bikes available at each station.”
By placing the bikes right by the building, we hope that the i-lab can be easily accessible for entrepreneurs from all across Boston. It’s just one way the i-lab is innovating even before we launch!
We’re happy to announce that the Harvard Innovation Lab will house one of those stations! We have a bike rack fitted for about 15 bicycles that students, neighborhood residents, visiting entrepreneurs, or anyone else can use to ride all across Boston.
To give you an idea of how convenient the bike sharing program could be, we calculated (using Google Maps and our own bike rides) how long it would take to bike to major locations in Boston from the i-lab:
- i-lab to Harvard Yard: 6 minutes
- i-lab to MIT: 15 minutes
- i-lab to Boston University: 16 minutes
- i-lab to Cambridge Innovation Center: 18 minutes
- i-lab to Boston College: 21 minutes
Harvard is a major supporter of the bike sharing program. You can learn more about Harvard’s support through the Harvard Gazette and the Office of Sustainability’s Facebook page.
You can read more about the Boston Hubway bike sharing program in general through the Boston Globe and Boston Herald. Photo above courtesy of IBM Smart Planet.
