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by jurassic
3137 days ago
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bike share bike actually being ridden. I have seen rows of bike share bikes sitting parked taking up useful space that could have been allocated more usefully as public parking for people riding bikes they own. I assume there must be some aspect to this business I’m not understanding if they are able to talk cities into giving them valuable street space and investors into backing them to the tune of $50M+. I’m not seeing what value they add by centralizing ownership of what is already a very inexpensive and democratic mode of transportation. What is the play here? |
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One person's noticing or not noticing bikes being ridden is a poor way to judge the effectiveness of a city-wide program.
I know I've seen plenty of bike-share racks mostly empty of bikes. I could assume from that that these bikes are currently being used. But that's a poor way of judging too, because I don't know if they were ever full, or how many bikes were stolen or lost, etc.
The real way to judge is from data collected by the agency in charge of the bike share program itself (assuming they keep such data and that the data can be trusted), or to have some independent third party keep track of all the bikes and their use.