Says Inhabitat:
The program will allow registered members to unlock bikes electronically with a “smart card” or credit card for a set amount of time, with fees determined by how long the bikes are taken out (much like Zipcar). Trips for half an hour or less would be free. And in order to deter would-be thieves, each bike will be outfitted with GPS units and RFID identification tags.
Rad! Bike sharing always looks like so much fun! Read on!
. Trips for half an hour or less would be free. And in order to deter would-be thieves, […]</p>
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Wait wait wait… 1,000 bikes for $7.9 MILLION?
That’s a cost of $7,900 PER BIKE!!!!!!!
A lot of the cost is probably initial infrastructural stuff though, right? Then we can add lots more bikes as the program grows?
Yeah, but if we just bought regular $200 bikes, we could have 40,000 bikes for that price. Really ugly ones that nobody would steal.
The real problem is wait wait wait
1000 bikes across San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View and Redwood City
Other pilot projects have shown that bike sharing needs density and saturation to work successfully. That’s just not enough bikes in too large an area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi
“In Montreal, the system provided 3,000 bicycles and 300 stations located around Montreal’s central core by June 2009,[2] expanding to 5,000 bicycles and 400 stations later that summer”