Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Who Needs Red Bike ?

Cincinnati's bike share program has always seemed odd to me. Who makes it downtown and, smacketoblowety, needs a bike to go somewhere else downtown?
In a Fishwrap article, a downtown worker states:
"I never bike to work. Ever. But I bike at work, from meeting to meeting several times a week. That’s not captured in the census data," McVay said. Her office in City Hall always has a bike around for that very purpose.
So, like I have mentioned before, just buy a cheap bike for your short trips around downtown…
But then this letter writer pointed out:
While it is an honorable endeavor to attempt to increase bike usage in Downtown Cincinnati through the new Red Bike bike-sharing program, it has one screaming problem: The system is incredibly economically exclusive . Requiring the use of a credit or debit card to use the bikes leaves out a portion of the city who may, ironically enough, have more use for increased city accessibility options.
This actually makes some sense.
This UrbanCincy article describes the extremely rare instances where the program makes sense and has a map of real and proposed stations. None of the stations are located by the homeless shelters, City Link, nor the new women's center on Reading Road. It might be hard for an individual to obtain an annual Red Bike membership on a monthly welfare check but it seems like the social agencies could find a way to pay the $80 lump payments while the poor people could make installments to pay the agencies back.
Did the bike share people even consider this element of the population?

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