I’ll also add that, while I wouldn’t say no to more public subsidy, that $75 gets a lot. A wide network of stations and bikes. Maintenance on those bikes so they remain in good shape. Crews to re-balance bikes from full stations to empty stations. My $75 doesn’t come close to covering what I get, which is why the public subsidy is important as is the cost to tourists.

My only worry is the execution: will they have the resources to properly allocate bikes so that they can handle rush hour… It took some time in Paris to calibrate. In that sense, it’s good if the pricing scheme is expensive to tourists and occasional bikes.

New York will have 10,000 bikes at 600 stations! It’s a whole other league of service. You can ride further, go more places, reach more people and more destinations. You should be comparing it with London and Paris, yes, but also Hangzou, and maybe Barcelona and Montreal as well, but even those systems are only half as big. Throw in the 45 free minutes instead of the standard 30 minutes and I think you are still talking about a great price in NYC, again especially considering it’s a totally unsubsidized system.

Boston’s annual membership is $10 cheaper than New York’s, but Boston closes down for the winter. Chicago’s B-Cycle has just six stations and costs $55 for three months!

Are New Yorkers really “being asked to spend much more money per year than bikeshare users in just about any other major city”? Only if you look at bike share through a very narrow lens.

My only wish was that the upper east side was included in the initial roll-out. This neighborhood is far from the Lexington Avenue subway, and could really use a transportation system like BikeShare.

Of course, if it’s “too popular”, I hope they’ll expand it accordingly!

While I think your argument is more nuanced, (Yes, NYC’s programs is one of the more expensive ones in the world), I still think you don’t quite get it, based on the above quote. I can tell you from experience that most cab rides EASILY cost more than $10, and you don’t always have three friends waiting to share a ride with you, and most people make more than one trip per day. If you do have three friends, and that’s the only trip you’re making that day, then obviously the taxi makes more sense. Everyone looking to save a buck would choose taxi in that case.

However, there are many many instances, where bikeshare is the obvious choice in terms of convenience AND price, despite the relatives high fees. I was going to start listing off a bunch of couter examples, but there are so many instances where this is the case that it’s not really worth it. The fact that you need to hypothesize very specific situations where bikeshare is not the best option kind of proves the opposite point: that it is usually a really good option. That is the point of the system: adding another option for NYC transportation. Sure it’s on the high-end compared to other cities, but for $95/year, or even $10/day, the benefits to me (and you) are easily worth the price, and I think many many others will feel the same way.

But if it’s targeted to occasional users, I really can’t imagine a rational pricing scheme that would discriminate between occasional users who are New Yorkers and those that are tourists.

(Yes, our tourists get taken for a ride and we don’t mind it at all since many visitors seem not to mind that arrangement, especially the ones from overseas who benefit from favorable exchange rates.)

That said, I’m going to buy in for a year on day 1. I’m not the typical NYC resident (I regularly ride a road bike for more than 10 miles a day, in the pursuit of fitness and transportation) but I’m sure there are enough of us avid bike riders to seed a bike share system with 10,000 initial units. The dream scenario is that 10,000 bicycles are not enough, since that may have ripple effects for transportation politics across the region that could have enormous progressive benefits for everyone. (Except people who drive regularly in Manhattan and can’t bear to give up a second of free-flowing driving time. Poor John Cassidy.)

Of course a “free bikes” weekend at the start of the campaign would be both helpful for prospective members (though you have to worry about network strain driving people away) and would serve as a major publicity campaign for Citi and the Bikeshare program. My suspicion is that it would be hardly necessary.