Once again, liberals offer proof of their economic ignorance.
All I see are rows and rows of very expensive looking bikes - and very few empty spaces.
NYC must be one of the worst places to bike in. I stopped biking in Central Park years ago because of the loons trying to kill each other by reckless biking. After I was almost killed by a messenger on Lexington Avenue, I came to hate bikers in the city.
All they had to do was ask people for Bikes they are not using and millions would show up ,FOR FREE
Who covers the insurance on these riders if they experience or cause an accident? The libs are totally clueless. I remember their mantra from the 60’s/70’s,”If it feels good ,do it!” God save the Republic.
For one thing, it tries to make the case that the $95 annual fee is excessive, but in fact it's actually too low for the company to stay in business. These bikes are very popular among NYC residents for any number of reasons (you don't need to store the damn thing in a tiny apartment, for one thing), which is actually part of the problem the company running the program is facing. In order to make the system work, they have to have a large number of staff continuously traveling around the city picking up bikes from crowded destinations and returning them to other locations where the racks empty quickly. A typical regular user, for example, may pick up a bike on the Upper West Side and ride it to Penn Station for a train trip somewhere else. Multiply that by many riders who are all doing this at the same time (morning rush hour), and you can see how you'd have an issue with imbalanced demand.
The other thing the article doesn't point out is that these programs work very well in other places. Washington D.C. is a good example of this. One big difference between the NYC program and the Washington program is that the NYC has many regular users who are paying the $95 annual fee, while the Washington program has far more one-day users ($7) than annual users ($75/year). Most of the NYC bikes are used by residents/commuters, while most of the Washington bikes are used by visitors. That makes a huge difference on the revenue side.
The only thing I see “sustainable” is liberal idiocy.
This is not nearly as good an argument, at least in NYC, as the author seems to think.
The whole point of the Citibike is that it allows efficient combination of public transit, such as the subway, for traveling long distances, with the bike for shorter distances from the subway station to destination.
That won't work with a bike you own unless they let you take it on the subway, which I don't think they will.
My stepson owns a bike shop in Columbus, OH. They tried this there and found it an unqualified successful way to have bikes stolen. The cancelled the program after a few month because of lack of bikes.
But hey just because it didn’t work in the backwaters of Ohio doesn’t mean it can’t work in NYC, right?
But what about if you live in town?..The main advantage it has the parking rack for the bike..
So for the poor that live in town that would probably want to own their own bike..
If NY just had bike rack you could park and lock your bikes in..like bus station locker
But correct me if im wrong Newyoker..it probably illegal if you own a bike to lock it to something on the street?..like the rest of the world can...so the thing that kill bikes is not having a place to park around town as you do your thing during the day