The proposal includes the installation of 35 stations and would bring 350 bikes to Madison in May.
The tentative user fees range from $10 day passes to $65 annual passes, and there is a proposed student annual price of $45.
Users would use credit or debit cards to pay for the passes.
Chicago, Denver and some European cities are among those with bike sharing systems already installed. According to [Director of Operations for B-Cycle Danielle] Dejean, in Denver the use of the rented bikes replaced 43 percent of car trips.
According to Dejean... Sorry, I don't believe it!
"Bike sharing is synonymous with world-class cities," Dejean said.
So get a bike-sharing system and be a world-class city.
ADDED: The only way this is an "unexpected expense" is if this is an impulse purchase. Either it was carefully planned and thought-through, in which case they shouldn't tap the contingency reserve fund. Or it's a sudden flight of fancy, in which case they should calm down and figure out exactly what they're doing and whether it's a good idea.
By the way, what happens if the bike gets stolen en route from one station to the next? What keeps annual pass holders from stowing the bikes at home between rides? What happens when kids don't use helmets? Etc. etc.
Meade, immediately: "Oh, man! That's going to make bleeding-heart moderates like you like him even more."
Immediate Althouse: "Obama is being thrust into the arms of the onrushing GOP!"
Meade: "In the same way that H.W. befriended Bill Clinton, W is going to befriend Obama. You'll see them playing golf together. Maybe even mountain biking."
In cyclocross, riders compete along a rugged course with obstacles that force frequent dismounts and require riders to carry their bikes while running up stairs and steep hills and jumping hurdles. The rider who completes the most laps in the time allowed wins.
Surely, you're at least tough enough to be a spectator:
“You can often see the majority of the course from one single spot, which is something we just don’t get in road racing or mountain biking,” Smith said. “It’s very welcoming and casual.”
Richard Cohen* still rides a bike, but his mind is going. I mean, he's riding his bike, listening to a folk rock channel he created on Pandora on his iPhone, and for some reason, instead of throwing new stuff at him, which I think is the point of Pandora, it keeps playing the old Neil Young song "Ohio."
Cohen plunges into his 40-year-old memories about how awful it was when the National Guard shot and killed 4 college students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And naturally, in Cohen's bike-drained, folk-music befuddled brain, that leads to what's wrong with... Glenn Beck!
Why don't you see? Back in 1970, the Governor of Ohio said the protesters were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent." Cohen weaves his literary magic for us dogged old WaPo readers:
That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals...
... fetishizes about liberals... To "fetishize" is to make a fetish of. How do you make a fetish ofabout something? Cohen's rugged bike path is studded with incomprehensible prepositions.
... and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage...
What language? You didn't even quote anything from Beck. Maybe you created a Pandora channel for Beck and you listen and ideate furiously while cycling, but I don't know what you're talking about. I don't pay much attention to the pudgy chattering TV pundit, but he doesn't seem to be raging. I have seen him crying. And oddly, in Cohen's first paragraph, he portrays himself struggling (while biking) to "repress a tear" when Neil sings "Ohio." Oh, compassion! It either builds credibility or it doesn't. (Depending on whether you're liberal or conservative.)
... that fuels too much of the Tea Party...
I'm supposed to have the right image of the Tea Party so I can just swallow that assertion whole. But I've been to Tea Party rallies — and heard about them from my husband — and the people seemed pretty nice and normal. To me, Cohen's attempt to smear ordinary people is what's ugly.
Cohen rants some more about how awful everything on the right sounds to his folk-music plugged old ears. He concludes:
I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.
Pedal on, aging columnist. Let the stream of consciousness wash down. Flow river flow. Wherever that river goes, that's where Richard Cohen wants to be.
And no, Richard Cohen doesn’t catch the irony: The dissent of Kent State protesters, he thinks, was met with deadly force because of rhetoric that “otherized them,” that turned them into a domestic enemy. Pretty much exactly what Richard Cohen is doing to the dissidents of the Tea Party movement.
ADDED: I laughed a lot when I took that picture of the Snow Lion label. My camera has face recognition and it identified the picture of the lion on the left as a face.
Jure Robic, the endurance bicyclist, who pushed himself beyond sleep and beyond reason, rode 50 mph down an unpaved twisty hill and who knows what he was hallucinating when he hit that car and entered into the final, endless ride that is eternity.
[H]e once rode 518.7 miles in 24 hours....
One occasional feature of his training regimen, which included daily rides or other workouts stretching between 6 and 10 hours, was a 48-hour period without sleep: a 24-hour ride followed by a 12-hour break followed by a 12-hour workout. ... [He] rode 28,000 miles — more than the circumference of the Earth — every year.
His five victories in the Race Across America, an approximately 3,000-mile transcontinental ride that has been held annually since 1982, are unequaled....
The winner generally sleeps less than two hours out of 24 and finishes in less than nine days....
In 2005, Robic won the race and two weeks later won Le Tour Direct, a 2,500-mile European version with a course derived from Tour de France routes that included 140,000 feet of climbing — almost the equivalent of starting at sea level and ascending Mt. Everest five times. His time was 7 days 19 hours.
As each race went on, Robic’s temper grew shorter and occasionally exploded. He was prone to hallucinations. More than once he leapt off his bicycle to do battle with threatening attackers who turned out to be mailboxes.
Amazing. With races like this, somebody has to be the guy that can go to the greatest extreme. Robic was 45, and it's hard to see how he lasted that long.
Yeah, the show's back, with the tribes split into old (40 and over) and young (30 and under), and it's on Wednesdays now. And Meade's wearing his "Survivor" T-shirt.
It all makes sense. Except... Meade should have been there on the oldie team. He's way over 40. But he did earn that T-shirt. (Enlarge to read.)
Of course, the article inside isn't critical of Michelle Obama and her eat-your-vegetables shtick. It's critical of Obama, but not because he eats cheeseburgers, because he "loves up industrial agriculture." We're supposed to identify with the angry woman swinging her lo-cal phallic symbols at her man. (At least they aren't cut up phallic symbols like the ones Hillary famously foisted on Bill.) The cheeseburger Obama prefers — like the onion rings Bill Clinton preferred — is a symbol, a symbol of what he loves. In Obama's case, according to the article, it's agribusiness. He "loves up" agribusiness, that big sloppy, gooey cheeseburger.
It's Utne Reader, that magazine for aging lefties, and the article assumes you're into the anti-business agenda. The magazine assumes you'll identify with Michelle and her vegetables and is oblivious to the possible revulsion you might feel to the angry face they've given her. You're supposed to think: Yes, Obama, come back to your lefty roots. (Note: Carrots are roots.) Your policies need to kick big business in the ass and embrace the local and sustainable and holistic.
But I didn't get that far into the magazine. The library was closing and the rainstorm was ending, and we needed to get back to the Glacial Drumlin Trail. I only had time to read: 1. a letter from the editor by a subscriber who was sending back an issue of the magazine because it had Sarah Palin on the cover and she didn't want to look at that ever ever ever (though presumably the articles inside assailed the Alaskan), 2. "On Being Fat and Running: Abandoning insecurity for a full life," by Brenton Dickieson, from Geez, and "Sentenced to Life: A man ages in prison and outlives society’s fears," by Kenneth E. Hartman, from Notre Dame. But none of those things are accessible on line, so I can't send Utne Reader some traffic and set up some discussion about that here.
The Hartman article is a reprint, and — unlike the Geez reprint about running while fat — the original is on line, so you can read it.
Prison is a young man’s world, a world of physical violence and posturing, a world of brute strength and primal, unfocused rage. It is not a place to grow old, although more and more of us are doing just that: growing old in prison.
But Utne Reader is not a young man's world — or a young woman's world. It feels like an old person's place. I felt too young for it... and I'm old. Or it's for those other aging Americans... the lefties. I see these people in Madison all the time. Do they feel left behind? Do you think the day will come when "lefty" will seem to mean left behind?
IN THE COMMENTS: lemondog has a way to get to an enlargement of the cover. Here's a closeup screen grab that shows Michelle's face:
The artist is Jason Seiler. Nice work. I notice the cigarette over the ear now. Ha.
Using lemondog's method, I can get to that letter about Sarah Palin. If you page forward in the magazine, you'll find it. You can see the cover that upset the poor woman so. She complains:
When the media gives air space, page space, and cover space (albeit in jest or irony) to crazies such as Palin, they are complicit in her plan to lend credence to the climate of ignorance, sensationalism, and just downright muddled thinking that is passed off as a national discourse these days — and which she is one of the most visible muddlers.
Jeez, the mere image of Sarah Palin unleashes hysteria.
AND: The image of Michelle Obama drives other people nuts. Women's faces. They're so provocative.
I like an overcast sky with photographable clouds.
But I don't want to hear thunder. This is how it looked just before a big downpour.
We sought shelter in the library in Deerfield. I read the Utne Reader (after Meade handed it to me) and Meade read the Mayo Clinic Newsletter until the librarian said she was closing in a minute. The worst of the rain was over, and we pedaled back over the trail, dodging chipmunks and frogs and one dark brown rabbit.
