How can we make bike sharing programs compatible?

In the comments thread for this morning’s breakfast links, Ben relayed some news (or maybe not so new news) that Arlington is planning a bike sharing program. According to various commenters, the program won’t be compatible with DC’s SmartBike, since SmartBike works with Clear Channel, Arlington doesn’t have bus shelter advertising, Clear Channel thinks Arlington is too small, Arlington wants more smaller stations, or for other reasons.

Those constraints make some sense. At the same time, Arlington and DC are missing a huge opportunity. Imagine being able to get on a bike on Capitol Hill and ride to Crystal City (and one day Alexandria too), or from U Street to Clarendon (and maybe Tysons Corner, too). Why must the Potomac remain a major barrier between two walkable, urban places right next to one another?

Ideally, we’d have one system. Given the way each jurisdiction likes to customize its own programs, differences in financing, and more, it’s probably not realistic to mandate that everyone buy into Clear Channel’s system (plus, then Clear Channel has a lot of power). Are there ways we can make the systems work together better anyway? My PC can talk to a Linux Web server which can talk to your Mac just fine. An Arlingtonian’s SmarTrip works on Maryland buses. If I buy gas in Delaware, it still fuels my car registered in DC. Can bike sharing work the same way?

Here are a few ideas:

Member reciprocity. How about making the membership cards compatible, and requiring any regional public system to allow other systems’ members to access it as well? Presumably each jurisdiction will collect similar information. If an Arlington member damages or steals a DC bike, DC could force them to pay just as they would if an Arlington driver gets a ticket in DC.

Bike transfer stations. At one end of each bridge that’s open to bikes, put a pair of stations. One is a DC station, the other an Arlington station. A DC member can ride up to the transfer station, check in the DC bike, and instantly check out an Arlington bike. It’ll only add a minute or two to the time it takes to bike across the Potomac. As more jurisdictions set up their own systems, they can establish transfer stations at high-traffic crossings as well.

Compatible bikes. Each system has a number of bikes, and some trucks that shuffle the bikes around to keep them even. How about requiring that each station accept the others’ bikes, using some kind of standard locking mechanism? The systems can keep track of whether more bikes are going from DC to Arlington than vice versa, and at the end of the day, the reshuffle trucks could return bikes to their correct jurisdictions. If there’s a big shift during the day, they could transfer some bikes midday.

This option is more complicated, but most convenient for riders. It’s analogous to the way banks handle money: if I write a check to someone who uses another bank, that bank credits you the money, and at the end of the day the banks all add up the transactions and transfer money to cover any shifts.

Most likely, this third option would be too complex. But just reciprocity and some transfer stations would go a very long way to making a regional system usable by all.

Any other ideas?