The City of Wichita has launched a new downtown bike-share program.

BikeShareICT will let people rent bikes by the hour, or purchase a $30 annual membership ($20 for college students).

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of the bike docks Thursday, Health ICT program manager Becky Tuttle said that the initiative is part of an effort to make Wichita more bike-able.

“Even though most of the stations are starting downtown, this really is for everyone in Wichita, and then for the people who join and visit our community," she said.

So far there are 3 bike stations—at the Pop-Up park, the Garvey Center, and at the downtown YMCA. City planner Scott Wadle says 16 more are in the works, for a total of 100 bicycles.

“Hopefully within a month’s time, we’ll see a lot more of these stations," he says.

Wadle says the Wichita Bicycle Master Plan, approved by the council in 2013, included a recommendation that the city look at the feasibilty of a bike-share program."

"This is an opportunity to test it out on a tremendous scale," he says.

The program is sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, which gave $194,000 to provide bikes and marketing for the first year of the program, as well as the Knight Foundation through the Wichita Community Foundation.

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