You’ve been punked by DOT!!

Hope you and your little friends enjoy being overcharged to ride around on an overweight bike advertising for Citibank.

LMAO

Dude, what’s wrong with you?

You pay 95 bucks. You ride a bike to work. You ride another one home. You ride one to the park on the weekend. You ride one back from the park. None of these trips take more than 45 minutes.

If you did this year round, you’d be paying FIFTEEN CENTS per trip. How difficult is this to understand?

use:
the first 30 minutes are free.
After the first 30 minutes you will pay € 0.50 for every subsequent half hour or fraction of half hour for a maximum of two hours.
Remember that the bike cannot be used for more than two hours*. After the two hour limit, you will be charged a € 2 penalty per hour or fraction of hour. Service is automatically suspended if you exceed this time limit three times. In this case, you can’t reactivate your card but you must subscribe again.
At least 10 minutes must elapse between the first and second use.

Not sure why this concept is so hard for otherwise smart journalists to graps. Ride it and drop it off so someone else can use it. $95 a year is cheap compared to every option except walking. Wise up crap ass writers!

For a more comprehensive view, looked at from the annual membership aspect, see:

http://www.blogto.com/city/2012/05/is_to ronto_overpaying_for_bixi_bike-sharing/# comments

The key to NYC is that while the $95 annual fee is on the upper end of the range, they give you 45 min instead of the 30 min in other cities. And the 10,000 (TEN THOUSAND!) bikes will ensure lots of opportunities to use it. It will be a home run.

In Sweden, for 20 kronas a day 2.5 US$ you can rent a bike for 24 hours. In Lund, they provide a bike for every student free of charge (300 Sw Kr deposit / year only refunded when you bring back the bike).

Bikes are maintained by city hall workshops free of charge to.. Why such a nice policy ? No car lobbying groups no Swedish oil company, no car industry ( except Volvo), heavy taxes on the purchase of cars. And a national mobility management scheme at the national level. In every city, the access to downtown is limited.
Consequences : very low air pollution, and plenty of people biking all over the place ( more than 50% of urban trips in Lund are performed on a bike).
The city halls save a lot of money on repairs as a bicycle track requires almost no maintenance. Urban dwellers are much more fit and show a better physical health.

Another poster alluded to this, but if you have a system where the majority of trips are 2 hours or more, it’s much more difficult to guarantee availability. The amount of turnover in CaBi means that you can march up to a station and almost always have a bike there.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/05/08/bi ke-share-is-for-short-trips-not-four-hou r-jaunts/

The trip to Governor’s Island analogy is ludicrous. If you wanted to take a recreational pleasure driving trip to the countryside, you’d never hire a taxi to do so, you’d rent a car. Similarly, you wouldn’t take a bikeshare on a long recreational bike trip either. You’d rent a bike from a bike shop. The pricing will make this an extremely obvious choice. Apparently, though, it’s not obvious enough for Felix Salmon to understand.

I think the fact that NYC has multiple business districts, along with people who live/work in ALL parts of the city, will mitigate the issue greatly. And then Alta is required to redistribute as part of their agreement – that cost has already been priced into the program.

Here’s the post: http://spatialityblog.com/2011/09/29/spa tial-analysis-of-nyc-bikeshare-maps/ I discuss other aspects of DOT’s crowdsource project (data quality, spatial analysis techniques, etc). But about halfway down I get into the nuts and bolts of rating the crowd’s suggested docking station locations in relation to subways.

I’m looking forward to seeing the DOT’s final maps. I’ll try to compare the actual docking station locations with what the crowd had suggested over the last year, and how closely the locations match the crowd’s preference as well as the actual subway entrances and exits.

As a periodic (every few weeks) visitor to NYC, the $95 annual membership is a bargain. All I ask is that NYC keep building more protected bike lanes!

That said, I wouldn’t want to keep the bike for hours even if it were cheap. You can’t let it out of your sight; it might be stolen and then you’d have a $1000 bill for the missing bike. The bikes don’t come with locks; do you expect tourists to bring their own?

In any case, it is true that the fees are way more expensive than other cities, even London, which is a very expensive city in general. The daily fee of $10 for casual users is particularly bad.

Casual users, doing short hops between meetings/tourist attractions, improve the system’s diversity. Or they would do if not deterred by a $10 daily rental. They’re not the answer to the redistribution problem, but they help.

In an ideal world, you’d also have small incentives for those who move bikes from full or nearly full, to empty or nearly empty docking stations (maybe points on an incentive scheme).