Building a bike-sharing system is tricky business, largely because it has to work for people who aren’t yet confident about cycling.

Planners say it has to be extensive enough that a bike for rent would be available within easy reach of a lot of potential users, with drop-off stations near the end point of a ride.

And people need to feel they can use the bike to get from Point A to Point B in safety — which, in a city with streets as congested as Honolulu, can raise a lot of question marks.

This is the conundrum faced by Bikeshare Hawaii, the nonprofit organization working to assemble the finances to put it all together. And it’s no small amount of money that’s lacking: The pricetag for the network being envisioned for a 2017 launch is $10 million, with only $2.5 million in the bank so far.

Most of the money raised to date comes from city and state grants, but its planners say that the goal is for a deal with unnamed private sources currently under negotiation.

That would be the optimal outcome, because there is risk in this enterprise, and taxpayers have invested enough. The risk is that Honolulu ends up with expensive bike-sharing infrastructure in places where the demand doesn’t warrant it.

Bikeshare Hawaii is working toward a system comprising 1,400 bicycles for rent to be picked up or dropped off at 150 stations in town. The proposed locations are plotted on a map on the group’s website (community.bikesharehawaii.org/#/tab/mapSite Opens in a new tab). They are tentatively at sites in the urban core, arrayed roughly between River Street and Diamond Head, including a cluster on the University of Hawaii campus.

The idea was to position the stations in areas where many people live, work and recreate, so that there’d be a critical mass of folks to make use of them, said Ben Trevino, the group’s president and chief operating officer.

That makes good theoretical sense. But it will take careful coordination with the city and the neighborhoods to ensure areas have the number of bikes appropriate to meet the demand for the destinations.

The most practical approach may be to phase in the project in urban zones that are somewhat self-contained — UH-Manoa would make a good test.

Additionally, Trevino said, there are off-road cycling paths serving the Waikiki-Kapahulu community, which may appeal to tourists.

The good news is that Bikeshare is embarking on a community outreach campaign, which will be necessary to vet the locations selected. Trevino added that the sites are suggested because there is space available for a station and because a usable bike route is accessible nearby.

Trevino said there will be cycling classes planned, and cycling groups organized to let newbie riders feel the safety in numbers. But finding routes that fit within the comfort zone of casual cyclists may be harder than the current site proposals suggest.

The city’s planned network of routes, supplementing the somewhat controversial cycle track along King Street, has been delayed as well.

Given that this is an election year, and controversial items tend to be sidelined for the duration, it’s unclear how well the bikeways development will dovetail with the bike-sharing timeline — or whether there’s political will to continue it at all in the next mayoral term.

We hope there will be, even if the King Street track hasn’t yet attracted the hoped-for crowd of cyclists. Trevino said it will take the addition of cross-town arterials in the bike-route web before new cyclists will believe the option will get them where they need to go.

He’s right about that, and about another facet of the plan: Studies show that getting motorists acclimated to cyclists in the mix on the streets will have the effect of slowing traffic a bit.

That’s actually intentional in the design, Trevino said — and a city with a rate of pedestrian fatalities as horrendous as Honolulu’s ought to consider this a benefit of committing to a more multimodal transportation approach.