The news is always bad, people say. And it is true that conflicts, fires, murders and general mayhem are well covered. But there’s more to a year than its horrors and problems. In honor of the end of 2011, I’d like to direct your attention to some matters that turned out well.

• Hubway. Let’s give credit to Nicole Freedman, familiarly known as Boston’s bike czar, or czarina, as the case may be. The bike-sharing bikes and stands are good looking. Gradually they have been placed at more and more convenient spots. They’ve proven wildly popular. To those people who complain that Hubway doesn’t provide helmets, just go get your own. London’s bike-share program doesn’t provide helmets either.

A London friend explains why bike sharing is so good. He has his own bike, which he rode to work. But if was raining hard in the evening or he had to go somewhere after work to which he couldn’t ride his bike, he’d leave the bike at work. Then he wouldn’t have it for the next day’s commute.

Now, however, he doesn’t worry about the weather or his schedule. Depending on the day, he might bike both ways, or he might take the tube or walk to work and ride a bike home. Or vice versa.

It looks as if Brookline, Somerville and Cambridge will soon have at least rudimentary bike-sharing programs that will work in concert with Boston’s. Boston’s outer neighborhoods need bikes, but those will come.

Freedman was tight-lipped about the struggles to get this program off the ground, but it appeared that the struggles, including the costs, were significant. Good for her to persevere. She’s got a winner, and so do we.

• Mayor Menino’s light touch with Occupy Boston. Yes, the occupation cost Boston a lot of money in police time. There were a few holier-than-thou people who complained that the occupiers needed to get jobs. I wonder if those self-satisfied individuals knew how much student debt some of the kids had, or how hard they had tried to get jobs, or even if they were employed but out there on the Greenway when they were not working. And if one is lucky enough to have a job, the right thing to do is to give others a break.

The occupiers’ circumstances were all different, but some things were the same. The occupiers were largely benign. They and the police got along well. Their message was clear enough—they were the 99 percent. They dramatized the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, a condition that seems un-American to anyone who has pride in America’s promise of opportunity. So the mayor, who everyone says learned from those regrettable confrontations in Oakland and elsewhere, held his fire. The occupiers put the Greenway on the map. And they gave us a new term to use in jokes: the new robotic explorer that NASA sent off to the red planet in November? Occupy Mars. Iowa voting today? A threat to Occupy the Caucuses. (We’ll see if that comes off.) What our family called our 17-person Christmas dinner in New Hampshire? Occupy Francestown. What we’ll call the Beacon Hill Civic Association’s meeting tomorrow night, at which Capital One bank will try to get permission to move into Beacon Hill’s most prominent intersection? Occupy Zoning and Licensing.

• Apps: Flashlight. Leafsnap. MBTA Time. Pandora. Those are my favorites. These apps not only have great utility, but they show off the ingenuity of their creators with their ease of use and variety. The American inventive spirit is not dead if a guy sitting in his Somerville apartment can turn out a way for you to tell when the next train is coming, when the whole MBTA hasn’t been able to do it.

• The Boston City Council. I know, I know. They just hired one of their own to marry people at City Hall. But, aren’t you glad they are a serious bunch? Not loony like Dapper O’Neil. Not toxic like Louise Day Hicks. Not creepy, like city council wanna-be Joe Casper. Not crooked like Chuck Turner. Instead we’ve got honest and clever John Connolly and Matt O’Malley, not to mention Felix Arroyo, and Stephen Murphy, who looks like a typical Boston blowhard pol, but actually has all the facts and figures of Boston in his head. And wouldn’t Louise Day Hicks love it—Ayanna Pressley, an attractive, smart black woman topping the councilor-at-large ticket this past fall. Just because I didn’t mention the other councilors doesn’t mean I don’t like them. A few mishaps now and then, but they are honorable and refreshing—not like their embarrassing predecessors of old.