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Spin's bikes will be parked neatly all across the city Where? Have they arranged appropriate parking places / staging points on private property? Or do they

by masonic 10y ago

Spin's bikes will be parked neatly all across the city Where? Have they arranged appropriate parking places / staging points on private property? Or do they play to just lock bikes to sign poles and streetlamps? Imagine the visual pollution of thousands of brightly-colored bikes strewn around (or, worse yet, taking up capacity in bike racks that then limits their use for individually-owned bikes). Many cities have banned random newsracks on public thoroughfares for exactly this reason (including S.F.).

jessaustin 10y ago
Bicycles are beautiful objects. The appearance of most cities would be vastly improved by a generous salting of colorful bikes.
- mdrzn 10y ago
  Until there are too many.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Is this a slippery-slope argument? "You might not mind five bikes parked on your block; what about a THOUSAND?" Five shared bikes on a block would probably remove at least a couple of automobiles from the block, on average, so I'm all for it! Presumably cars would disappear entirely well before we got to a thousand shared bikes, so if we stopped then we'd be fine...
    - mdrzn 10y ago
      Five is ok, if there's a place meant to be the bike parking place. If not, that's five bikes locked up to poles and street signals. What about a hundred?
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        Does the block have 500 shared-bike riders present at any particular time? Conservatively assuming that the average rider is riding an hour a day (which would be 24:1), a 5:1 riders to bikes ratio is also a conservative assumption. If there are that many riders, then by all means it's reasonable to have 100 bikes present as well. If there aren't enough poles and racks, the bike company or the city can plant some more. It still won't cost near as much as maintaining the streets.
twelfthnight 10y ago
I thought of this too. A lot of the major SV players (like Airbnb, Uber) make their money based on the fact that they can charge less money because they aren't paying for the negative externalities of their product. As consumers, we're happy to pay less for hotels / taxis / bike sharing, these companies are happy to make profits. It's a win, win and hence these businesses thrive. However, everyone is participating in a short of cheat, because they aren't paying as much as they should. The difficult part is that these business models seem to actually be really useful, but it would be nice if there was a happy medium between totally skipping out on paying for negative externalities and complete governmental regulation and the ensuing inefficiencies.

by masonic 10y ago

jessaustin 10y ago

Bicycles are beautiful objects. The appearance of most cities would be vastly improved by a generous salting of colorful bikes.

mdrzn 10y ago
Until there are too many.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Is this a slippery-slope argument? "You might not mind five bikes parked on your block; what about a THOUSAND?" Five shared bikes on a block would probably remove at least a couple of automobiles from the block, on average, so I'm all for it! Presumably cars would disappear entirely well before we got to a thousand shared bikes, so if we stopped then we'd be fine...
  - mdrzn 10y ago
    Five is ok, if there's a place meant to be the bike parking place. If not, that's five bikes locked up to poles and street signals. What about a hundred?
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Does the block have 500 shared-bike riders present at any particular time? Conservatively assuming that the average rider is riding an hour a day (which would be 24:1), a 5:1 riders to bikes ratio is also a conservative assumption. If there are that many riders, then by all means it's reasonable to have 100 bikes present as well. If there aren't enough poles and racks, the bike company or the city can plant some more. It still won't cost near as much as maintaining the streets.

twelfthnight 10y ago

I thought of this too. A lot of the major SV players (like Airbnb, Uber) make their money based on the fact that they can charge less money because they aren't paying for the negative externalities of their product. As consumers, we're happy to pay less for hotels / taxis / bike sharing, these companies are happy to make profits. It's a win, win and hence these businesses thrive. However, everyone is participating in a short of cheat, because they aren't paying as much as they should. The difficult part is that these business models seem to actually be really useful, but it would be nice if there was a happy medium between totally skipping out on paying for negative externalities and complete governmental regulation and the ensuing inefficiencies.