Also with monopolist it is really easy to keep some standards, quality of the ads.
[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.]
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.
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.
Is this an argument for public-private deals?
This seems very implausible. People's largest expenses are things like housing, healthcare, childcare, and groceries, which are mostly not driven by 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.
Great, so long as motorists pay the full cost of the roads.
As road wear and tear is proportional to the third or fourth power of axle weight.
i.e. Even a fully loaded Escalade does roughly ~1 cent of road damage for every hundreds of dollars a normal city bus does.
Everything is a choice, we don't HAVE to accept these shitty ads everywhere.
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.
> money is fungible
What?
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.
Yes, it's a trade off. I wish my city had free bike share.
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.
This seems like an odd question to ask, many many cities have bylaws regulating even smaller stuff, and they are often discussed on HN.
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...
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.”
And I won't even go into the corruption that got them the tender in the first place... Fuck JCDecaux!
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.
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...
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.
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. 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.