What’s Wrong with Bike-Sharing?
A lot, says Greg Beato, of Reason Online. The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank/publisher. I think Beato misses the point, saying this in his concluding paragraph:
But if a bike-sharing program’s utility mostly lies in how much secure parking it offers—and it does—why bother with the bikes? And the sharing? Let users be responsible for obtaining their own bikes—that’s the simple part of the solution.
Secure bike parking is just one of the many utilities of a bike-sharing program. And really, “secure bike parking” is encompassed by the one overall functional utility of a bike-sharing program—to make bicycling extremely convenient. Many folks have bicycles “in their basements or in their apartment balconies,” as the Washington D.C. bicycle coordinator said. Even those necessary maintenance tasks—digging out the old bike, dusting it off, making sure it has air in the tires, making sure everything is working—prevent people from biking. Bike-sharing programs address that head-on.