On September 20, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian Fenty announced the launch of the largest bike sharing system in the U.S. With a plan for more than 1000 bikes in D.C. and Arlington, this is huge for D.C. and bike sharing in the U.S. You can sign up on the Capital Bikeshare website. They're offering annual subscriptions to the service for only $50 (rather than $75) for a limited time.

By the way, the Capital Bikeshare launch gave us an opportunity to launch a new feature on Ride the City. For cities with bike sharing (like Ride the City - DC Metro), we now show all the bike share stations on the map (look for the little green markers adorned with an 'S'). Click on one and we'll tell you how many bikes and empty docks are available at that station. Check out the screenshot below for an example. (You can turn off the bike share markers using the Map Layers dropdown, where you can also toggle bike shops/rentals and bike parking.) 

Special thanks to the folks behind Capital Bikeshare (D.C. DOT, Arlington County, and Alta Bicycle Share) for making the bicycle station status information available as an XML feed.