B-Cycle kicked off yesterday -- which didn't stop drunks on Saturday from trying to rent bikes

B-Cycles are back! Yesterday was the first day the shiny red bikes with the spacious baskets were available for rentin' and ridin' in Denver. (Note to bad parents: The basket is not a baby seat. Your baby is not E.T. If your baby is, in fact, E.T., well, you've got bigger problems than bike safety, so nevermind.) But B-Cycle busted out 170 of its bikes ahead of schedule for Saturday's St. Patrick's Day parade -- a move that confused a few would-be renters.

B-Cycle's plan was to have up to 250 volunteers ride its bicycles in the parade and then dock them at one of fifty stations around town. By late afternoon on Saturday, most B-Cycle stations had a handful of bikes in the corrals. The rest were to be delivered by truck over the weekend so they'd be in place for the Monday kickoff.

The parade plan "helped us reduce our carbon footprint," explains Ben Turner, B-Cycle's sales, marketing and PR director. The volunteers were given RTD vouchers so they could get home safely -- and in a more environmentally friendly way.

But some revelers saw the docked B-Cycles post-parade and mistakenly thought that the program was up and running. We here at Westword personally watched a few people approach a station, swipe their credit card and try to jiggle a bike free to no avail.

But good news, drunken Denverites! All 500 B-Cycles are now available for jiggling.

More from our Things To Do archive: "Five things you didn't know about B-Cycle."