by Angie Schmitt, November 10, 2010, StreetsBlog

Attendees of a designers' conference take a spin on Minneapolis's bike-sharing system, Nice Ride. Photo: UCDA Design Conference
The early data is in on one of the country’s pioneering bike-sharing systems, and it brings some encouraging news.
Minneapolis’s Nice Ride, which launched this summer, topped 100,000 trips in its first five months. Crash rates and vandalism were very low. Perhaps most interesting was the effect on driving, reports The Bike-Sharing Blog. Nice Ride surveyed 680 users and found that nearly 20 percent used the system instead of driving:
That’s outstanding and is quite higher than other cities’ mode shift percentages from bike-sharing, which includes Lyon, France with only about 4% shifting away from driving, according to the NICHES publication on bike-sharing. Not too shabby.