It has cost £82 million to put up a bike-share scheme in London? I had to re-read this, and I still doubt myself! Am I the only one to think that, for that price, you could have given a bike to everyone in London? Incidentally, that was the same thought that many people had when the amount for the banksters’ bail-out was announced: For that price, can you not just help pay the mortgages of all the people in-trouble?

Yes, yes, there are issues with just handing money to people–but apparently there are none/fewer for handing them out to banksters and corporations!

I’d read a similar thing about the bike-share scheme in Montreal. The cost of it had really surprised me. The designer of the bike, itself, could barely ride a bike, and was not a bicycle commuter. A fundamental requirement of the design was that it be patentable, so as to earn revenue from franchising. The resulting solution was so corrupting to the problem that I thought it the Segway of bike-shares!

The incompetence involved in such dealings defies belief. They are not only afflicted by the fact that the decision-makers are mostly car-drivers (or have been conditioned by a car culture), but that the obvious benefits (financial and otherwise) of simple bike-sharing do not suffice for them.

It is akin to a disease!