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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

The award of the contract for the outdoor advertising space (bus shelters, roadside space) in my city was tied to providing and maintaining a cheap metro-area wide bike sharing scheme. For 30ish euros a year I get unlimited 45 minute trips on bikes that are widely available, well maintained, and easy to use. In 2022 there were more than 10 million trips taken on these hire bikes and nearly 84,000 annual subscribers.

This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space. There's not more ads, just a monopoly on who sells the space to advertisers. The city might be prettier without the advertisements but it seems a good trade off to be removing vehicles from the road and promoting healthy transport via the bike scheme.

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We have something similar and it was a terrible deal. The city still had to pay a boatload of money to set up the system, but it's proprietary so we can only "buy" more stations and bikes from the same company. They, of course, refuse to sell at a reasonable price, so for every new station, more ad space is created and given to them. The term of the contract, which is 25 years, is also insanely long and far longer than the maximum we allow for such contracts normally (5 or 10 years).

And I won't even go into the corruption that got them the tender in the first place... Fuck JCDecaux!

The same thing in my city with jcd bikes: no new stations in a decade, only a handful of bikes available, bike stop density nowhere near anything I've seen in a large city in Southern France. Meanwhile, every bus stop, every street corner or prominent billboard is owned by jcd.

Your comment has encouraged me to dig up anything I can find about our municipality's contracts with jcd during the upcoming holiday break and, if it's anything like what you've said, raise some awareness.

I've been meaning to do the same. I'm currently trying to get information on the number of billboards and when they were put up through FOIA requests so I can run some numbers and I already made some interesting visualizations of how badly the stops are located from JCDecaux's API.

Our capital got these bikes 10 years before us and had similar issues. A small news outlet made a pretty good report on the "secret costs of city bikes" and that's kind of what I'm going for: https://podcrto.si/skrita-cena-izposoje-koles-v-ljubljani-og...

It's not a good trade, there shouldn't be a monopoly on public ads, local businesses should be able to reach consumers without having to go through a monopolist that captures all of the value.

The alternative is to not have a cheap popular bikeshare system.

Also with monopolist it is really easy to keep some standards, quality of the ads.

False dichotomy. The alternative is to have a cheap popular bikeshare system supported by taxes.

[Edit to reply to okr, because I'm rate-limited:

Well, then, make the users of the bikes pay the full cost of the bike service.

As it is, you're pushing ads in everyone's face, whether or not they use the bike. Also no thanks.]

So, instead of paying my money for a bike as a choice, a monopolist takes money from everyone. Very funny, but no thanks, i take Ads anytime over that.

The collective community ends up paying a lot more in quality of life with these ads up. Also, ads are the primary way to get the lower economic classes to give their money to the rich.

You give money to get goods. What is wrong about that?

You give money you can't really afford to give in order to get goods that you don't really need. You do so because advertisers are skilled professionals, and are better at manipulating you than you are at not being manipulated. And they have put themselves in places where you cannot help but see them. That's what's wrong about that.

This has little to do with advertising.

Consumer sentiment will be shaped by media other than advertising. You watching Instagram of people drinking alcohol and (seemingly) having fun will make you want to drink alcohol.

Ads for a particular type of alcohol will only steer your selection of product, but do not induce a desire to get it.

> ads are the primary way to get the lower economic classes to give their money to the rich

This seems very implausible. People's largest expenses are things like housing, healthcare, childcare, and groceries, which are mostly not driven by advertising.

In theory. But in real life you'll pay more with taxes for poor service.

My big city in Poland tried several times to get public-private bike sharing. It ended the same: company ceases operation after few years and take all bikes from the streets. People get nothing while millions already spent.

I live in NYC and I wish bikeshare was a part of public transport. Kids get to use them with their pass, low income gets them, they get the same importance as the train or bus, etc. All part of one system instead of having to use the Lyft or any other app.

Kids already get to use Citi bikes for free, as long as they’re part of certain privileged classes (such as asylum seekers or border crossers).

The brouhaha over the pregnant nurse “stealing” a youth’s Citi bike was only possible due to the habit of under-18 users camping on bikes to continue riding them for free when their timer expired.

> My big city in Poland tried several times to get public-private bike sharing. It ended the same: company ceases operation after few years and take all bikes from the streets. People get nothing while millions already spent.

Is this an argument for public-private deals?

>Well, then, make the users of the bikes pay the full cost of the bike service.

Great, so long as motorists pay the full cost of the roads.

The beneficiaries of roads are much more than motorists. Almost every employer and the government needs roads to operate. The motorists include trucks that keep society functioning. You would have no food, water, or electricity in 1-2 weeks without roads.

The beneficiaries of road alternatives include road users as well. Since it benefits road users, it also benefits everyone you just listed.

Then let private motorists pay their share of the upkeep. I'd throw out a guess that it's upwards of 99%.

The reality is the opposite, heavy trucks and buses are responsible for practically all road damage.

As road wear and tear is proportional to the third or fourth power of axle weight.

The same logic applies to railways, airports, cargo ships.

I don't know what to say here anymore. Is this city not capable of collecting taxes? Is this how they pay for any sort of public infrastructure? What monopoly did they exchange to have some private company build and maintain roads, pipes and cables?

Local businesses would benefit substantially from the bikeshare service though.

Not if that bikeshare service captures all their profits by having a monopoly on ads.

That makes no sense. Most local businesses don’t even have ads on bus stops. Let alone that being where most of their profits are invested???

The ad space exists and the city owns all the ad space. They either get in the business of pricing it and selling it themselves, or they contract that business out. In this case, a condition of the contract was you have to pay for the bike scheme.

So the possibility that the space remains ad-free doesn't exist?

Everything is a choice, we don't HAVE to accept these shitty ads everywhere.

> This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space.

Yes, it's a trade off. I wish my city had free bike share.

> So the possibility that the space remains ad-free doesn't exist?

It does exist, but then the cost of the bike sharing would have be borne by

a) users of the bike system - this would impact ridership and equity of access. b) local govt - budget would have to come from somewhere.

considering b) would likely mean that the project wouldn't get past planning, really a) is the only alternative.

Everything is a tradeoff.

From my perspective, I'll take shitty ads if the money earned from those ads is spent on significant quality of life improvements. Same reason I support legalization and taxation of gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc where the revenues pay for schools, social services, etc.

This is shitty equity too though, I can't ride bikes but I still have to look at your ads and make do with worse economies of scale for public transportation that's accesible to the disabled. If bike share is a public good. It should be paid for out of public funds, if the city decides to sell advertising rights in public spaces then it can. Those two ideas need not be linked, money is fungible!

If public funds pay for it, you personally (assuming you pay taxes) are also paying for the program, but this time with real dollars instead of attention.

> money is fungible

What?

Money can be moved.

From where? You might live in a flush city, with lots of extra discretionary $$ flowing around, but most cities in the US are nearly bankrupt, and leveraged to the hilt on providing basic services. This is the definition of a "luxury belief", thinking the average city can just find money and put it towards removing ads that pay for services.

But I don't want to sell my attention! At least not at the crappy valuation the bike advertisers offer.

Money being fungible means that one dollar is as good as another. It all goes in a big pile for the budget. In other words, you don't have to match up your revenue sources with your costs (like bikes with advertising), though this is frequently used for the purpose of trying to justify one thing or another.

These are assertions but that's insufficient to make policy. To make policy you often need to tie things together because constituencies will want to keep net costs low as they trial programs.

It's not "ad space", it's our cities. Why is it even possible for them to "sell ad space" to private business? Should be made illegal.

We want to live in nice towns not in cyberpunk hellscapes where we can't even cross a street without being violently bombarded with advertising. A business should be able to put up a sign on its own building and that's about it.

How can a city own all the ad space when there's private property? What stops a property owner from putting up a billboard and renting it out?

Laws against privately putting up a billboard anywhere that can be seen from a public space, without prior municipal approval.

So the monopoly isn't just there because the city happens to own all the existing ad space, but is rather something legally created, and then sold to a private company.

Well yes, everything in a city is 'legally created'.

I mean this appears to be a similar model as a utility. Right? Basically a legal monopoly with a set of restrictions. I don't see how it's really a bad thing.

> This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space.

No, there are many ways to generate revenue to pay for things like that at a (local) government level. Your city sold the ad space and immediately bought an essentially unrelated service (bike sharing) from the same party.

> immediately bought an essentially unrelated service

At least the way it works here (Boston area's Bluebikes) is that the same infrastructure supports both the bike sharing and the ad space. There are ads on the bikes and their docks.

>This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space.

I get what you mean, but arguments like this confuse the underlying issue of how we value and price things. It's certainly not "only possible" that way. It makes me think of the Mark Fisher line “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

I wonder how much this bike contract actually takes to maintain vs how much the holder gets in advertisements. Even if near flat even, which feels unlikely as why bother holding the contract then, it's still a way with more overhead than just funding the bike program.

I guess you live in Lyon, France, same as I do. Even if I despite the ads, the bike sharing deal is quite good for users and the city.

it is absolutely possible to achieve the same without ads. your city simply does not want to do it.

it feels like 1 in 3 cyclists is riding a Vélo'v, Lyon is a very nice city

This is cool!

They should force restaurants at public places to provide places to sit, even if you don't buy anything.

Instead, they do crap like anti-homeless spikes...

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