The Radical Roots of Bikesharing | Hacker News Reader

The Radical Roots of Bikesharing

bloomberg.com

67 pointsoccurrence24 comments

Tangential : there is a Dutch saying Eerst mijn fiets terug [0], which roughly translates to First I want my bike back.

It is/was a meme which targets Germans as the Nazi occupiers confiscated some Dutch bikes during their bike sharing program at the time ( this is a bit trivialised ).

[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eerst_mijn_fiets_terug, Dutch only, sorry.

convenience link https://nl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Eerst_mijn_fi...

there was a bike share in the 1940s? that's pretty amazing

Bikesharing makes visiting cities cities much more enjoyable: instead of having to choose between travelling underground or having to keep track of a rented bike, you can enjoy cycling with a shared bike and not worry about locking it or having it returned during working hours before you leave.

Even if this whole thing started as an anarchist experiment, it makes a lot of sense as a way to boost tourism. It's a pity cities like Barcelona restrict these bikes to residents.

I'd love to read more about the lives of the initial Provo activists, and to hear their opinions of how their ideas and actions transpired within and outside of their hopes and regrets. Their opinions of the issues of today would be very valuable.

First time I loaded the page, a giant scroll-locked ad took up more than half the page, and music started blaring. I go back again and no music. Scroll too far and you have a new URL, which if you refresh the page on, now you can't go back to the old article.

I feel like this is all an artifact of web browser design. No stand-alone application would work like this.

It's an artifact of cludgy anti-scraper design that sacrifices user experience at the altar of copyright.

There is an error in the article : it suggests 3,300 deaths/year in Amsterdam @ 1971.

This should be for the whole of The Netherlands.

Archived: https://archive.ph/05X1o

Reed College in Portland, OR has had a similar "commie bike" system in place for many years. At the start of the year/semester students go to goodwill, get a few dozen bikes - often children's bikes, since they are cheaper and less likely to be stolen - and then spray paint them red. The bikes are placed on campus and anyone can use them to get around.

Now the true radical bikesharing scheme is to leave your bike unlocked.

I have owned bikes that were so crap that I never bothered locking them.

Which is what the article describes.

No it isn't. It's describing a bikesharing system with no payment system. I mean leaving your personal bike unlocked, and taking another when its missing.

If you are purchasing a bicycle with the expectation that others will use it and you will in turn use theirs, then I'm not sure the term "personal bike" applies.

It's more like your personal contribution or donation to a collective scheme. This seems like what this article describes.

That's basically what some student have been doing here for decades now, though not out of idealism. The disadvantage is that sometimes a local entrepreneur comes by to sell you your own bike back for 20 euros cash.

Blindly fumbling through the night, you bump into something foreign. Feeling it, brushing your palms and fingertips across it, you realize what it is: the fundamental contradiction of private property.

The Burning Man event has a problem with people taking those unlocked bicycles. Unless you’re prepared to steal someone else’s bicycle, you’re walking back to camp.

>Unless you’re prepared to steal someone else’s bicycle, you’re walking back to camp

Thats the whole point.

People forget that stealing is a form of radical self-reliance

'Bikesharing' means 'often not having a bike (your bike!) when you need it'

That's a big obstacle to the idea. If you're an idealist student with no external repercussions to a screwed-up schedule, sure go right ahead and lose your bike. But anybody more embedded in a society is going to find bikesharing useless really fast.

As a counterpoint, when I commuted to an office in NYC I relied on CitiBike for the last leg of my journey, as did several thousand other office workers.

I will admit there were a few days where I stood in a line outside of Penn Station to wait for a bike, and on those days biking was no faster than taking the subway. New York has a lot of commuters coming into the center which meant a shortage of bikes near train stations in the morning and a shortage of docks there at the end of the day. (They had workers in box trucks rebalancing, and eventually an scheme [1] akin to dynamic pricing to incentivize regular users to rebalance bikes themselves.)

I think a larger issue preventing the success of bike share is the fact that the US is an automobile-first culture so biking is unsafe in most parts of the US. The first thing I noticed when seeing bike commuters in other countries was the number of there were old folks, kids, and women biking for transportation in the city -- unlike the US where the majority of bike commuters are adult men with a high risk tolerance.

[1] https://citibikenyc.com/bike-angels

That must be why usage of the urban bikeshare programs is growing so fast.

Still tiny, so a few new programs can look like explosive growth.

And be honest; there are stories of bikes abandoned in piles and thrown into rivers in frustration by pedestrians. It's not been a clear winner yet?

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