Robbie wrote: > From the guy that brought you the video about why it's nearly impossible to > ride in the bike lanes in New York. A very well-made little video comparing > how much of a pain a short commute is via taxi, personal bike, and the new > bike sharing system. > > http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/06/should-commute-citi-bike-one-mans-hilariously-detailed-analysis/5940/
I was surprised by a couple of things in the video. 1) Considering that many of us on this list would probably consider bicycle commuters to be more intelligent than the average person, I was astonished when I saw the guy in the video start to draw his "pain in the ass" chart. He had the marker in the wrong hand; despite his bikie credentials, he was apparently not smart enough to be left-handed. Total cognitive dissonance there. Admit it, seeing the marker in his right hand totally caught you off guard, too, true? 2) I don't quite understand why he found his own bike to be a pain in the ass to use. If you are using it for the entire commute (about the same distance as my partial commute by Red-Bikes-for-Pay), unless it gets stolen, it's guaranteed to be right at your point or origin and you can take it all the way to your destination, not true of the CitiBike, The biggest problem I've found with bikeshare in Madison is that I very often get to my station at the end of the day to find no open docks, and the nearest alternate stations are, well, not very near at all (because my return station is among the more remote stations) and it ends up taking more time to return the thing than it would just to walk the mile or two. On average, this happens about once a week, which means a 20% failure rate (and usually on days when I'm most in a hurry, or at least it seems that way), either that I've checked it online and I know I won't be able to find an open dock and do only a partial return trip and walk the extra distance or, worse, that there a couple docks open when I depart, but I find it full when I arrive, so I've already biked a little farther, have to bike a little more back toward where I started to find an open one (on Friday, I had to back track two stations, not just one), and then retrace that distance on foot. In the words of the video guy, HUGE pain in the ass, There are a lot of things I like about bCycle, but this massive failure rate even more than two years into the system demonstrates that it is still not ready for prime time, still with some bugs to work out.
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