Minneapolis is going with “Nice Ride.”

Last week, DC and Arlington announced a massive new regional bike-sharing system to replace SmartBike and be implemented later this year. But what will it be named?

DDOT has a survey at which you can vote for up to three of their 17 ideas, but the “other” box at the bottom of their survey implies that nobody is too enamored with any of the suggestions so far.

Can we do better?

For the record, here are the 17 candidate names put forth by DC and Arlington: Bike2Go, BikeAround, Bikington, CAB (Capital Area Bixi), Capital Bikeshare, George, GoBike, Capital Bixi, PopCycle, ShareCycle, Spin, Velo2Go, Ucycle, WeBike, WeCycle, YouCycle, and ZoomBike.

Several of those names follow the SmartBike model of a compound word. That seems suggestive, so here are some ideas along those lines:

Pick one word from each column to form a compound:
City

Wash

Smart

Best

Metro

We

Our

Flex

Share

Skip

Hop

Zip

Web

Net

Bike

Cycle

Ride

Velo

There are 112 unique combinations using that table. Some of them duplicate DDOT ideas, like WeBike and WeCycle, while others invoke familiar brands, like MetroCycle and ZipBike. While WMATA and ZipCar might object to names that imply a connection, would anyone care if we took advantage of an old car-sharing brand and named our system FlexBike?

What about something like BikeWeb, which could open up all sorts of fun logo concepts, or something like CityCycle, which might be a little generic, but hey, alliterative. VeloFlex sounds cool, but will Americans accept such a European-sounding name?

Of course, the name doesn’t have to be a compound. Maybe Hop works better on its own. Or maybe there’s a good acronym out there, following the CAB model. Or we could deviate from the word Bixi itself. Replace the B with D for DC and you get Dixi, with all its political connotations, but W for Washington results in Wixi, which could catch on. Or maybe we invent a new word altogether; Bixi is a combination of bicycle and taxi, so how about we combine bicycle and Metro to form Bitro?

There are thousands of ideas out there. What do you think? Like one of the 17 DDOT suggestions? Like one of mine? Got your own? Let’s hear it.

Dan Malouff is a transportation planner for Arlington and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has a degree in urban planning from the University of Colorado and lives in Trinidad, DC. He runs BeyondDC and contributes to the Washington Post. Dan blogs to express personal views, and does not take part in GGWash's political endorsement decisions.