ASPEN — Aspen will wait another year for the long-awaited launch of a bike-sharing program.

Organizers of WE-Cycle are now aiming at 2013 for the debut of community bike sharing — a program they initially hoped to launch in the spring of 2011 and then pushed back to 2012. The latest delay, said WE-Cycle’s Mirte Mallory, is the result of the federal procurement process through which a vendor is being selected to provide certain components of the system.

“Let me tell you, this has been a long, thorough process,” she said.

WE-Cycle has lined up a number of founding partners, including the Aspen Institute, Aspen Meadows, Aspen Skiing Co. and the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, intending to launch bike sharing without a local tax subsidy. Also among the partners are the city of Aspen and Pitkin County, which both allocated congestion-mitigation and air-quality grant funds to the program.

The local governments are contributing federal dollars, funneled to them by the Colorado Department of Transportation specifically for efforts that reduce congestion or improve air quality, but use of the funds triggers a procurement process that has taken longer than organizers anticipated.

Nonetheless, Mallory said she expects the selection of a vendor within the next few weeks. The vendor will then have six months to acquire the necessary components of a system that organizers expect to operate seasonally, from May through October. That means a debut in the spring of 2013.

WE-Cycle will purchase the bikes separately, but the vendor will provide the stations, or kiosks, and the computer software for the program. Three vendors submitted proposals; a selection committee will forward a recommendation to CDOT, which makes the final decision.

Read more about the WE-Cycle program.

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