Moscow Gives Biking a Go

“'It’s not easy to ride a bike in Moscow,' cautioned Alexey Mityaev, the floppy-haired, jeans-wearing twenty-seven-year-old adviser to the head of the Moscow Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development, as we headed out on a test run of the city bike-share program that just launched in the Russian capital. 'Sometimes you have to jump!' he called back to me as we left Tverskaya Square. Dodging his first car, he demonstrated, yanking his bike onto the dilapidated sidewalk mid-pedal. 'Sometimes you have to ride through pedestrians!'”

Moscow's program shares similarities with those in cities such as London and Copenhagen, says McGrane. "But in the Russian capital, bike sharing may not be as much an immediate step forward for commuting—the program is starting extremely small, both in terms of bikes and miles of bike lanes—as it is a small, concrete triumph for grassroots political activism."