If you ever travel by bicycle on O'ahu — or if you're a motorist who hates cyclists — grab your chance to comment on the draft O'ahu Bike Plan at www.oahubikeplan.org. You have until Aug. 31.

It's a thoughtful, competent draft, and, it seems to me, very cautious. It lacks more far-seeing, "disruptive" (in the good sense) proposals.

Take one example, bike sharing. Also called a public or community bike program, it is increasingly popular around the world.

Municipal governments, community groups and businesses partner to give people access to free or affordable public bikes as an alternative to motorized transportation for short, one-way trips around a city.

The goal of encouraging bicycles for short trips is to reduce traffic congestion, noise, gas consumption and air-pollution, including carbon emissions. Often ignored are the benefits to commerce and civic life of making it easier to move around the city.

Bike sharing lets you pick up a bike, ride it somewhere and leave it. On the return trip you may take a different bike and leave it where you started.

Bike sharing comes in two flavors. On the community level, used bikes are restored, painted white or yellow and left unlocked to be taken and returned on the honor system.

The commercial, high-tech system uses specially built bikes, sturdy but not attractive, racked around the city at electronic stations often powered by solar energy. After on-line registration, you use a card to release a bike for a nominal sum, ride it and return it to any rack. Pricing can be used to encourage short trips rather than all-day use.

The bike sharing can be worked with a credit card, but imagine a single card good on TheBus, TheTrain (if and when) and at bike stations. Visitors could buy a short-term card for the length of their stay, but residents could have permanent cards linked to bank accounts. Electronically, it would be possible to give a discount on bus trips for using bike share more often and vice versa, encouraging bus riding and bike sharing to the max.

Imagine a safe, well-marked bike route separated from traffic connecting Waikiki to Downtown via Ala Moana and Kalakaua Avenue, with bike-share stands along the way.

You could borrow a bike Downtown to ride to Ward Centre, Restaurant Row, Ala Moana or Waikiki and leave it while you eat lunch, attend a meeting or shop. Think of the time it takes to get from office to parking structure, to exit the structure by car, drive and park in Waikiki — then reverse the process to get back to work, which is worse given the traffic nightmare of getting out of Waikiki. Many of us would find cycling faster and healthier. What better way to justify a calorie-laden lunch than riding to and from the restaurant.

Or imagine a visitor biking from Waikiki to Ala Moana or Ward Centre, Aloha Tower Marketplace, or the shops, galleries and museums of the Downtown cultural district. When it's time to return to the hotel, the visitor could choose between bike and bus, depending on how many shopping bags are in tow.

Wikipedia lists bike-sharing programs in at least two dozen cities around the world from Barcelona to Beijing and Rome to Rio (where it is called SAMBA). In the U.S., Atlanta, Boston, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Fort Collins, Colo., Washington, D.C, and Salt Lake City are listed, and there are probably more.

As a society, we provide roads and parking opportunities for motorists and public transportation, in part to encourage commerce and social opportunities. Government and the private sector could work together to encourage take-ride-and-leave bike racks in communities and support incentives for advanced bike-sharing systems easily copied from other cities.

According to the O'ahu Bike Plan draft, we are at an important juncture, with an opportunity to make O'ahu more livable. We can help deal with traffic, dependence on imported oil, greenhouse gas and a growing obesity crisis. It will take adding miles of bike lanes and bike parking, as the bike plan says, and encouraging motorists and cyclists to be nice to one another.

But I think it will take a larger vision of what our transportation future can be and for all of us to ask, "Why not?"

Peter Rosegg is an occasional bike and more frequent bus commuter. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.