Alison Cohen, founder of Bicycle Transit Systems, will receive the Maguire Award at the Bicycle Coalition’s 50th Anniversary Gala. Alison is being honored along with other advocates and active transportation leaders for her instrumental work in bringing bike share to Philadelphia. Alison’s company Bicycle Transit Systems manages all aspects of operating Indego, Philly’s one and only bike share that launched in 2014.
More About Alison
Alison Cohen is a proud Philadelphian and biker. She has spent the last 15 years of her career dreaming, sleeping, eating and thinking about bike share. After multiple career starts—in professional tennis, investment banking, grad school failure, and environmental consulting—she became obsessed with bike share in 2007 and has been on the wild ride since. As a co-founder of Alta Bicycle Share, she started bike share systems in Melbourne, Australia, Washington DC’s Capital Bikeshare, Boston’s Blue Bikes and New York Citi Bike. She started all these systems while living with her wife Nurit in their home in Mt. Airy.
She left Alta, and after birthing her first child, started the Philadelphia-based Bicycle Transit Systems. She kept and kept and kept knocking on doors at the City of Philadelphia, hoping that one day her home city would launch bike share. And after competing through the RFP process, Bike Transit won the contract in 2014. Since then, they have launched bike share in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and have powered over 5 million rides in Philadelphia. Bike Transit manages all aspects of operation of Indego, employing 140 people nationwide and 55 in Philadelphia.
When not thinking about bike share, Alison hangs out with her now 3 daughters aged 7, 7 and 9, and runs in the Wissahickon. A few highlights of her sports career are that she held the Lower Merion High School basketball scoring record that was broken by Kobe Bryant; she was ranked up to #400 in the world in singles in women’s tennis; and she and her daughters set the Guinness World Record in 2016 for the Fastest Half Marathon Pushing a Triple Stroller. It has since been broken.