Capital Bikeshare
bike sharing system in the Washington, DC area
Capital Bikeshare (also abbreviated CaBi) is a bicycle-sharing system that serves Washington, D.C., and certain counties of the larger metropolitan area. As of August 2025, it had 800+ stations and more than 8,000 bicycles. Opened in September 20, 2010, the system is the largest municipality-owned bikeshare system in the United States.
History
Genesis
The first of its kind in the US, SmartBike DC bike sharing service debuted in 2008 with 10 stations and 120 bicycles.
D.C. Department of Transportation Director Gabe Klein came into office four months later and was eager to expand it but found the private partner had a "lackluster commitment." Because the agreement specifically prohibited DDOT from paying for anything related to SmartBike, an expansion required DDOT to renegotiate the contract. But in his first meeting with Clear Channel he found that Clear Channel believed they had gotten a bad deal on the original contract that created SmartBike; that following their purchase by Bain Capital they were no longer interested in "municipal street furniture" and that they had neither desire nor obligation to expand the program. In addition, it was difficult and expensive to install new stations, because they required the local utility company to bring electricity to each station. As a result, Klein chose to end the program and instead work with Arlington County, Virginia, to build a new, regional bikesharing program to be called Capital Bikeshare.
Capital Bikeshare was to be owned by the local governments and operated by a private operator. Alta Bike Share received the operations contract.
The public source identifies “Capital Bikeshare” as bike sharing system in the Washington, DC area. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Capital, Bikeshare and bike.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1034635. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2010 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Capital Bikeshare” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.