Ben Fried

The Wall Street Journal schooled the world on how to generate pageviews with this instant classic of anti-bike insanity starring editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz. Approximately 3.4 million websites embedded this video before Streetsblog got around to it, and "Dorothy Rabinowitz" is still rocketing up the Twitter trend chart. Meanwhile, the Daily News posted an addled anti-bike conspiracy theory last night by someone named Jack Brown, and hardly anyone noticed.

I think I've figured out why, when it comes to allocating space on New York streets, the Daily News opinion team tends to take a position that's completely at odds with making the city a better place. The problem is that the Daily News opinion team doesn't understand how city streets function.

I don't care if this is a carefully choreographed photo op. For one day, at least, we're not going to run a picture of the Weinermobile in a post about Anthony Weiner. We're just going to link back to the most recent post with a Weinermobile picture. And we're going to turn this into a caption contest.

Bike-share users made 10,099 trips, and annual membership continued to surge in the third full 24-hour period of usage stats that Citi Bike is reporting.

We are rolling right along with our spring pledge drive. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far -- your donations will be converted into Streetsblog posts making the case for more livable streets and Streetfilms videos showing success stories and ideas from cities around the world.

Citi Bike has been compiling daily stats on usage and membership on its blog, and in the 24 hours between 5 p.m. Tuesday and 5 p.m. Wednesday, users logged 7,500 trips on the bike-share system. The number of annual members increased by nearly 2,000 over the same period, bringing the total to 21,300.

That acrid scent wafting from the News Corp. Building is flop sweat pouring off Col Allan and the New York Post editors as they watch tens of thousands of New Yorkers start using the city's new bike-share system.

Charlie McCorkell is a pioneering NYC bike advocate and the owner of one of the city's most successful bike shops, Bicycle Habitat. His flagship store is on Lafayette Street, just north of Spring, which is right in the middle of the Citi Bike service area. After observing the first day of NYC bike-share from the store, he sent a note of thanks to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

Yesterday's Citi Bike announcement was maybe the last occasion to see Michael Bloomberg answer a whole string of bike-related questions from the NYC press corps in one sitting. The mayor has a reputation for jousting with reporters at these events, sometimes more crankily than others. Yesterday he was combative but clearly enjoying himself. He had solid responses for just about all the questions that came at him.

Five years ago, the New York City Department of Transportation signaled its interest in creating an extensive bike-share system "to accommodate a wide range of potential short trips." Now New Yorkers have that system at their fingertips. With today's launch of Citi Bike, there's a new travel option in the mix -- 6,000 bikes at 330 stations that will extend the reach of the transit system and expand access to the point-to-point convenience of bicycling.