Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia they have publicly run bike shares and they work. We should do the same. That way we can invest in a single bigger network that doesn’t try to nickel and dime us. I don’t understand why we waste so much money on privatization or public-private partnerships even when it makes no economic sense.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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PPPs make sense for bike sharing I think. Companies care about the bikes looking good with their brands slapped on them, and the service being good as a proxy for their own brand quality. Lime OTOH is just a company filling up the vacuum of active transportation, that's not a real partnership. It's a testament that the city transportation is so bad that a ridiculously low margin business like e-scooters is able to make a profit off of it.
Canada spends about as much on public services as European countries and we get a lot less. Public private partnerships are a lot of the problem. Take the Mobi Shaw bike share in Vancouver. It's much more expensive than equivalent bike shares across Europe, many of which are free for residents. There is no market force keeping it competitive because it's basically a monopoly, so I don't understand why, even in theory, anyone would expect privatization to be helpful in this case.
I think the only advantage is that governments can save money in the short term by allowing companies to front the investment. But then the private companies make it up later in profit. This is like a privatized toll bridge. Governments can cook their books, "lower taxes", but we lose in the long run.
I tend to agree, I just think the PPP isn’t the root issue. If the City of Vancouver was primed to manage well the service, it could also manage well the PPP. Some PPPs are even costlier for govts, so it’s not always a matter of lowering taxes anyway. My biggest argument against PPPs is that the gain in “efficiency” of the private sector isn’t worth the middle man and for the same level of service it ends up costing more.
All I’m saying is that for bike sharing specifically, I think PPPs shouldn’t be hard to work out alright. It depends on how the partnership is designed. Also, bike sharing does compete with bike shops and other transportation sharing models.
seattle: so many abandoned scooters and bikes from lime and other services here, blocking sidewalks or tossed in ponds and rivers. tired of it.
I've been seeing more and more scooters left on the sidewalks in Coquitlam and I always wondered if people ran out of paid time or if the scooter ran out of juice. Turns out the states you can park a scooter on the sidewalk.