case study

Helping Cities Around the World Ride the Bike Share Boom

A man reading a map at a bike share station.

The Challenge

Bike share is one of the fastest growing public transportation modes around the world, with more than 800 municipal systems implemented on five continents. Bike share addresses the question of the “last mile,” how people can travel from large mass transit systems to their homes or places of employment. The concept reduces the amount of miles that cars drive, cutting air pollution and increasing physical activity of urban populations. But how can city governments figure out bike share best practices when implementing new systems?

Our Approach

The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy’s (ITDP) Bike Share Planning Guide explains the history of the concept and what residents need in an effective bike share. Burness promoted ITDP’s guide through extensive earned media and social media outreach, using an infographic that visualizes the top five components of a bike share system, along with a detailed press release that provided the statistical overview on the five best bike share systems around the world.

Results and Impact

The promotion presented the Bike Share Planning Guide, along with ITDP’s credentials as an urban planning resource, in Danish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Online stories also appeared in a wide spectrum of outlets, including CNN.com (mainstream media), Atlantic Cities (urban planning), TreeHugger (environmental), Healthline (public health), and National Journal online (US government-focused). The infographic helped move this online coverage and made the best practices more understandable to new audiences everywhere. As more and more governments deploy new bike share systems around the world, ITDP has been established as the go-to resource for this new source of mobility.

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