I predict that within 90 days of this fiasco's opening, most of the bikes will either be stolen or trashed so badly as to be unusable.
Your tax dollars at work.
Oregon & Washington *ping* please...
$4million buys a lot of bikes. I would think the $2m in private funds would be a plenty. They will lay around gathering dust or be stolen or trashed anyway. Waste waste waste for feel good projects that help a tiny percentage of people.
As I recall, Madison Wisconsin has such a program, but a volunteer group uses old bikes for the program?
Remember that first TV footage of Beijing when Nixon landed there in ‘72? That is what Portland is going to look like soon.
Reminds me of healthy food snack machines. Liberal “thinking” forces these on the public. Saw one in the early 70s. Didn't get much use.
$4 million startup costs.
Let’s say 10,000 people in the area use the service regularly. That works out to $400 per regular user of the service.
Then you have the yearly costs—including the cost of new city employees. Let’s say that’s only $1 million a year. That works out to $100 per regular user of the service.
$400 per person the first year, $100 per person the following years. It doesn’t take much numbers running to realize that it would be cheaper (a lot cheaper) for the city to just give people bicycles and locks.
Four million bucks for bikes? Even at $400 a clip that’s 10,000 bikes in Portland. Really? There’s a demand for 10,000 rental bikes in Portland?
Man, there is some serious “overhead” (read: corruption) to managing this as I would be surprised to see more than 1000 bikes hit the streets.
I understand this has been somewhat successful in London. However, in Boston, it has been a total dud, at least as far as I can tell.
The reason is that they charge $10 for each rental! Far easier (and cheaper) to use public transit.
I wouldn’t go that far to say it would be a failure. Over here in Minnesota, we have a bikeshare program that’s a huge success. What they did was they required the potential cyclist to pay for the rental vial credit card, put down a $200 deposit on the bike and then require the person to return the bike within 24 hours or else they lose their deposit. It costs around 30 bucks an hour to ride the bike (Which really cut into the bike rentals of the local bike rental businesses, BTW).
The risk of the bikes getting stolen and appearing in a chop shop is low, because the bikes have a distinctive look and on the open market, a bike like the ones they offer usually costs about 300$. Highly inexpensive for a bike and not worth the risk of a felony vandalism charge to chop them up and sell them.
In the bike-happy Twin Cities, the program’s become a huge success for a government program. That being said though, I think the private sector could have served the population a lot better and provided way more jobs and offered a better selection than the niceride MN pea soup colored bikes.
It’s really a bike give away program.
spread the wealth dontchaknow.
http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?c=50814#How much would it cost?
This is just so dumb. We have had a bike sharing program in my college town for 10 years. The bikes are trashed and rusty and nobody ever uses them. The program was an abject failure.
If you let people use something for free, they will give it no value and have no problem treating the bikes like junk, which they will be after a few months.
But, it is utilized by a very small minority whose presence may in fact hinder transportation in all the ways cyclists inadvertently gum up systems designed for automobiles.
With that said, if they extend the DC program into Arlington like they plan to, I will likely use it on occasion for trips too far to walk and too short to Metro.
No thanks. I’d rather drive my gas guzzling SUV with tush friendly seats, A/C and that will carry more than a bic pen.