Photo courtesy of Gothamist. Cute bikes. Where did you get the idea?

Welcome to the party, New York. You’re only a year late, but hey, whatever.

Our sister site Gothamist writes that New York City officials rolled out their own bike-sharing program yesterday, which when fully functional will include 10,000 bikes at 600 locations. (Streetsblog has more here.) The program will be run by Portland-based Alta Bicycle Share, and should be functional by summer 2012. Year-long memberships will cost $100, and the first half-hour of use will be free.

Yes, it’s certainly bigger than our own Capital Bikeshare, roughly ten times the size if you count bikes alone. But we were first — those loveable, if heavy red bikes officially celebrate their first birthday on September 20. Bikeshare has over 16,000 annual members and over 1,200 monthly members, and since the program started, users have taken almost 1 million rides. (How many calories burned is that?)

As New Yorkers start sharing bicycles, they’ll also likely look to us for best practices and lessons learned. Sadly, we don’t have everything figured out — like how to get more people to wear helmets.