Public bicycles to rent will be spread through four local cities this summer as the Capital District joins the nationwide bike-share movement.

The bikes will be available in Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and Saratoga Springs through electronic transactions.

The Capital District Transportation Authority is in charge of the program. CDPHP, which is short for Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan, is the title sponsor.

Large and small cities across the country have similar programs, in which bicycles of a standard style, color, and markings may be rented from racks in public areas.

In the Capital District program, bikes will be fitted with Global Positioning Systems that allow them to be tracked through radio navigation from satellites circling the Earth. Then the bikes may rented wherever they are left, mostly at designated stations.

The bikes can track calories burned, along with distance traveled and the time it took.

Carm Basile, the chief executive officer of CDTA, said the program, expected to kick off in late July or early August, will start with 165 bikes at 20 stations. The locations of those stations, scheduled to be announced June 15, will be in high-traffic places.

In the second year, the program will roughly double to 330 bikes and about 40 stations, he said.

CDTA received a $2 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration, administered by the New York State Department of Transportation. Grants cover up to 80 percent of the cost of each project, according to a press release from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office.

The Capital District bike-share program is expected to cost about $900,000 in each of the first two years, CDTA spokeswoman Jaime Watson wrote to The Enterprise in an email.

Regionally, people are becoming more interested in getting around in ways other than driving themselves as indicated by a “dramatic increase” in CDTA ridership in the last several years, Basile said.

Bicycle use often is seen as an alternative as people try to avoid traffic congestion in cities and think about healthful, environmentally friendly ways to make short trips.

CDPHP was happy to attach itself to the Capital District program, spokeswoman Ali Skinner said.

“It is kind of everything that we’re doing in terms of improving the health of the community that we serve,” she said.

She declined to say how much CDPHP is paying for the two-year sponsorship. CDTA also would not provide the amount.

A company from Brooklyn called Social Bicycles will run the local bike-share program. SoBi, as the company is known, was chosen in December over two other bidders — PBSC Urban Solutions and BCycle, according to Watson.

SoBi’s website lists 27 cities in the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, Australia, and Poland where it has bike-share programs. The Capital District program is among six more that are listed as coming soon.

To rent a bike, a person registers and punches in a code to open the bike lock.

Basile said the hourly rate will be $5.

Watson wrote in an email that users will have to sign up for an account. A separate membership plan and cost is still being worked out, she wrote on Wednesday.

The website explaining the local program is https://cdphpcycle.com.

Basile said CDTA committed around the end of 2015 to have a bike-share program. That followed a 2014 pilot program in the same four local cities.

An organization called Buffalo BikeShare — connected to a not-for-profit transportation entity — did the 2014 study, spending about one week at a time in each city. People were invited to try the bike-share program at no charge and their usage was tracked.

Buffalo BikeShare’s report showed:

— 133 rides in Schenectady, with an average distance traveled of 1.31 miles;

— 162 rides in Troy, with an average of .85 miles;

— 167 rides in Saratoga Springs, with an average of 2.42 miles; and

— 243 rides in Albany, with an average of 1.7 miles.

The gender breakdown of riders was close to even, leaning toward male in three of the four cities.

The report, which is posted at https://capitalmoves.org/capital-region-bikeshare-month, also discusses the factors and conditions for bike riding in each area.

“We at the Albany Bicycling Coalition are very enthused about the CDTA bike share program,” Ed Brennan, a member of the group, wrote in an email to The Enterprise. “The program design is very affordable and perfect for short rides and errands around town. It will be handy for people who cycle frequently and rarely.

“It is coming at a time when there have been many efforts to make our cities safer and more amenable to cyclists. There certainly are more improvements needed. The bike share program will get more people biking and will spur on more of those improvements.”