Bike lovers: I know you’ve been waiting anxiously for a bike-share program to begin in Boston. Bike-haters: I know you’ve been dreading the time when even more bicyclists will blaze through intersections, nick pedestrians, and veer wildly between cars, putting everyone at risk and incurring drivers’ wrath.

So how are things going? Not as fast as potential bike riders would like.

Nicole Freedman, the director of bike programs for the city of Boston, said she doesn’t know when the bike-share program will start, but she’s hopeful she can work out the details and launch it sometime this year.

Financing has been a hurdle, she said, but the logistics have been a large part of the problem. I asked her what the most difficult obstacles to overcome were, but she wouldn’t say. David Watson, head of MassBike, said he hasn’t been much involved, but thought the problem was still money. Freedman did say that crafting the bike share program has been like setting up a whole public transportation system.

“While it would have been good to be the first U.S. city to launch a system, it was even more important to us to do it right,” Freedman said in an email. “One of the obstacles has been to think through all the complexities with an eye towards a successful system 5,10 and 15 years down the road.”

She also said that the bike share business model has evolved considerably since she started work on the project.

One evolution is a change in the company that would manage Boston’s bike share. Freedman started out with Public Bike Systems, which started the bike-share program in Montreal. She is now in talks with Alta Bike Share, which runs programs in Denver, Miami, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. She said, as it stands now, Alta would run the program with bikes supplied by Public Bike Systems.

The current plan is less ambitious than the original one, but there will still be plenty of bikes—10 bikes at each of 61 stations in the downtown, Longwood, Fenway and Kenmore, Allston-Brighton, Roxbury and the South End. Transportation officials from Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville are interested in eventually linking with Boston’s program.

Freedman wouldn’t say how much the system will cost to set up. But she did say she has raised about $5 million through grants from the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program, the Federal Transit Administration, as well as the MBTA, the Boston Public Health Commission and corporate sponsorships. As a public official skittish about any kind of tax increase talk, she assured me that city coffers won’t be tapped for this project.

Costs for customers haven’t been fully worked out, but Freedman expects membership in the program might cost around $85 for an annual membership or $5 a day. “Our goal is to create a self-sufficient system, which would be a huge accomplishment in the world of public transit,” Freedman said.

Like Denver’s program, which starts up again this week, Boston’s bike share would shut down in the winter with the equipment going into storage. But that still leaves about nine months in which it would operate.

Freedman isn’t entirely comforting about improving bicyclists’ behavior. She mentioned that the mayor hosted two bike safety summits last year—not that anyone can see an improvement. Watson pointed out that it’s not just bikes that don’t follow the rules in Boston—it’s pedestrians and drivers too.

If and when Boston’s bike share gets started, Freedman says the users will be less experienced bikers and, one hopes, better behaved than the sleekly attired hot rodders now hunched over their expensive speeding vehicles.

She might be right about the new riders. Peer pressure surely affects bicyclists as much as anyone. Currently, the bicyclists’ peer group is often macho males whose culture demands they run red lights and risk death or mayhem. When we’re all out there on bike-share bikes, the peer group will change. More women, older folks, and inexperienced riders of all stripes will stop at red lights, avoid pedestrians and ride more slowly. Won’t that be nice.