A group in our sister city to the north is planning to launch a bike-sharing program inspired by Portland’s Yellow Bikes, a set of 16 neon green bikes that riders can pick up from bus stops and leave at other bus stops.
- Bike sharing in Mexico City
The Green Bikes boosters apparently haven’t noticed that Portland’s yellow bikes are no longer around. The free, brightly-colored bikes placed around the city depended on citizens’ good will to share them and call up a mechanic when they broke so, of course, most of the bikes disappeared. Occasionally they are found in the mud on the bottom of the Willamette. So, uh, good luck with those 16 bikes, Seattle.
Having enough bikes is a big deal for bike sharing. The most successful programs have a serious density of bikes (Paris has 10,600, Montreal has 3,000, for example) so that it’s super easy to pick up and return bikes across the city. Portland has been looking into starting up a more serious bike sharing program, where bikes would be rentable like Zipcars but the $2.64 million startup cost to put 660 bikes on downtown streets has so far dissuaded the city from jumping in. On the other hand, Washington DC applied for a federal grant to expand its bike sharing program to 1,100 bikes while even Des Moines launched bike sharing stations two weeks ago (though with only 18 bikes).
Bikes!
WE’VE TALKED ABOUT THIS BEFORE (http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/Blogto… SEATTLE IS NOT A PORTLAND SISTER CITY!!!
PLEASE STOP SAYING THIS RETARDED FUCKNIG CRAP!!!
The city of Portland has nine sister cities (info can be found here: http://www.portlandonline.com/mayor/index.…).
Ashkelon, Israel
Bologna, Italy
Guadalajara, Mexico
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Khabarovsk, Russia
Mutare, Zimbabwe
Sapporo, Japan
Suzhou, China
Ulsan, Republic of Korea
The building we are moving into has bikes for the residents to share with helmets and maintenance/repairs included.
Progress!
@Graham, I believe the sisterly connection comes from the relationship between The Stranger and The Mercury.
16: the over/under of the number of bikes that end up in puget sound
@catandbeard: Well, the Mercury’s sister paper to the north is able to correctly use the sister city concept on their blog. They even did that crap today when referencing Reykjavik.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/…
Jeez – ‘sister city’ can mean many things – in this case, Seattle is sometimes considered Portland’s big sister up the 1-5 corridor. The two major cities in the Pacific Northwest/US.
Try sticking to the topic at hand instead of nitpicking for the slightest things. There is nothing wrong with what she wrote. Get over it.
Bikes!!
Stolen. All of them within 6 months or sooner. Guar-un-teed. If not for useage or parts, for fun. If Portland is Thieftown, Seattle is a bustling Burgleopolis.
The ONLY way this might work is if the cost of the bike is held on a credit card that get’s swiped at the bike share station and even then…
How much is a decent used bike anyway? I don’t see why taxpayers should fund bikes for people. I could see a private system if people really just need easy access to a bike like that.
This did not work even in the gated community of Burning Man. The bikes were stolen, locked away, or broken by day three. This was 300 bikes in a homogeneous community of 50,000.
why are the bikes always ugly?
How about just sharing bike seats? Just put a few on popular streets (Hawthorne, Burnside…) and let people sit on them (they don’t go anywhere-they’re just seats, on a pole, stuck on a sidewalk) and we can exchange communicable diseases freely and without the agony of emotional and physical relationships.
Bike seat sharing program. Bam. Trademarked.
Just keepin’ Portland weird.
@ajnpdx, why does it matter if the bikes are pretty or not? Maybe ugly bikes will disswade people from taking them? Or maybe not everyone on a bike is trying to look like a SE cool kid?
If Copenhagen can do it why can’t we?
fuck seattle. worst place.
I’ll take the over.
I’m in Antwerp right now where there are dozens of spots you can rent bikes for around $5/week. It’s subsidized by the city and donations.
It’s affordable to nearly everyone and MUCH more successful than handing them out since the renter is responsible for the bike.
$5 a week? In Amerika you can buy a bike @ Walmart for $80 or a nice Huffy for $120. They will still get stolen or vandalized just like the nice ones.