Washington D.C. is about to roll out the first public bikes program in the US that might actually work. Sponsored by Clear Channel, starting next month,SmartBike will make available 120 bikes in 10 locations throughout the city, which anyone with a membership to the program can use.

Charging just $40 per year, SmartBike joins a long tradition of community bicycle programs, most famously the White Bicycle initiative in Amsterdam back in the 1960s. More recently, Paris, Barcelona, Portland, Oregon, and even Iowa City have experimented with the concept.

But the programs have often failed due to a single, unfortunate, fact of human nature: Not everyone wants to share, and before long free bikes get stolen, painted, and transformed into privately "owned" rides.

SmartBike requires its members use electronic cards, which they can swipe at the corrals where the bikes are kept in order to ride them. If one of the bikes goes missing, it's deemed "lost" after 48 hours and the last person to be recorded as using that bike will be charged $200.

With such a modest launch -- 120 bikes for a city proper of more than 570,000 people -- it seems that SmartBike is proceeding with caution. Hopefully the plan works, though, and maybe we'll start seeing similar high-tech updates to the White Bicycle in cities across the country.