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A comment on Adfree Cities: for happier, healthier cities. Parent comment

Re:Adfree Cities: for happier, healthier cities by franga2000 on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @02:21PM (#38632771)
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!

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Re:Adfree Cities: for happier, healthier cities by dantyti on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @04:06PM (#38634127)
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.

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Re:Adfree Cities: for happier, healthier cities by franga2000 on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @04:57PM (#38634737)
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...

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