Nice Ride Bike Sharing Kiosks Expanding into NoMi

Nice Ride Kiosk in North Loop. Photo by John Hoff

NoMi blog consumers will remember some lengthy discussions and some hurt feelings (rightfully so) that NoMi seemed to be completely forgotten about when the Nice Ride Bike Sharing Program opened shop.


Public officials and northside cycle enthusiasts even sat down with the Nice Ride proprietors and found a way to get a northside kiosk opened at UROC. There's even a video featuring one of the first rides from the UROC kiosk...


Now, Nomi folks can look forward to five new Nice Ride bike kiosks opening around the rest of the northside, although at this time, I don't believe the locations have been determined. It sounds like part of the funding will be used to engage the Northside community and determine the best locations for the future kiosks.


A city council vote that took place yesterday helped distribute some federal stimulus money to help fund the expansion of the bike sharing program. Another giant step forward in the revitalization of NoMi!

NoMi Needs Nice Rides!

Post and photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman

Not too long ago, Nice Ride Minnesota began a new bicycle-sharing program in Minneapolis. Almost immediately after the program was rolled out, people realized that there were no stations in NoMi - nothing north of Highway 55.

Having north Minneapolis miss out on such an exciting new amenity generated quite a few comments on the Minneapolis Issues Forum and Nice Ride's own Facebook page. The response from Nice Ride was that, basically, there were quite a few neighborhoods that don't have a kiosk, and they had to place stations close enough to each other to make the program work with the limited funds they have to start.

That seemed to make a lot of sense to me. I was okay with their response and strategy, I really was. That is, until...

...last night. While some friends and I were at Good Sports after helping trees find happy new owners, a woman came by riding one of the bikes from a Nice Ride kiosk.

First off, here's basically how the program works: You pay a subscription fee ($60 for a year makes the most sense) and then you pay additional fees depending on how long you have the bike away from the kiosk. Since the first half hour is free, Nice Ride claims that the kiosks are set up to be close enough to each other that riders can get from one kiosk to another without paying fees.

(Also, FYI - a $250 security deposit charge is placed on whatever card is used to check the bike out. So don't use your debit card unless you can afford to wait over a week for your bank to reverse the charge.)

So here we have a young woman who got on a Nice Ride bike, took it to a neighborhood that supposedly was too far away to merit a station, stayed for a few hours, and was brave enough to sing karaoke, give Mike Levey a hug, and then bike back home in the dark. This tells me that there's a market for Nice Ride kiosks in my neighborhood.

When Minneapolis was voted the #1 bicycling city in America, I posited that NoMi was missing out on some of the bicycling benefits that the rest of the city has. My thoughts at that time were largely directed at seemingly trivial aspects of biking. But this is much larger of an issue.

We're probably going to have bike lanes along Emerson and Fremont. With more and more people using bikes to get around, we should be looking into a bike shop as well. Bicycling is an increasingly important aspect of our city's infrastructure, and north Minneapolis deserves to reap the benefits of such amenities just like any other neighborhood.