Not sure how those are counterpoints, in that they are all deeply unprofitable services provided by large governments that are subsidized to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year. Maybe you should read my comment again.
I'm not sure how it matters that they're subsidized.
Cars are subsidized via road building/maintenance, after all, and it's likely to cost less to maintain a few bikes than it does to maintain roads/parking for the cars that would displace them.
Imagine if there were no transportation subsidies and road maintenance were privatized. A nightmare. It seems entirely reasonable that forms of transportation that can help bring tax revenues to a city are subsidized, and therefore entirely reasonable to create a start-up based in part on those subsidies.
HN isn't letting me comment on the reply to this, but in response - our systems can be subsidized if necessary. We're a B2B business right now, and sell to organizations that own/operate the programs. We're working on piloting our own consumer programs in places that are ripe to support them. Ultimately, bike sharing needs to make financial sense in one way or another, and we're confident our system does that.
I think there's a qualitative difference between a business model that can sustain itself and one that relies on rich backers to dump money into it every year, forever.
Isn't HN usually full of people saying you have to figure out what customers will pay for (meaning, what customers will pay more for than it costs you to provide)? Bike-sharing is not one of those things. End-user customers will not pay you more than it costs to provide.
I agree that cities subsidizing a bike-sharing system can make sense. But that doesn't help ViaCycle, which is going to have trouble if they can't run the system at a profit, since unlike the city of Paris, they can't pay for it out of tax revenues.
For example, DC's capital bikeshare comes from Federal grants that covered the setup costs, while Velib in Paris is entirely operated by JCD, an advertising agency that operates the system in exchange for advertising rights.
Take Velib. Last time I checked, JCD had revenue of $54 million, with an operating expense of roughly $35 million on Velib. The theft and vandalism complaints were regrettably exaggerated when the City and JCD were re-negotiating their contract last year. That they need subsidies to exist is patently false.
Financial aspects of US systems are also healthy as pointed out by other commenters.
On a related note, the subsidies to other modes, mainly rail and roads, are several orders of magnitude higher.
While I wish I could comment in depth on the subject, I will add Rio de Janeiro to the list. Here, we have orange Itaú (a bank that sponsors the program) bicycles throughout the city and they're quite popular. You sign up online and they have some sort of integration with your smartphone. I was recently informed they are R$10 (US$5) per month on a monthly plan. The downside is, also from what I've heard, you have to dock them every hour and take another bike.
Also, they add benefits to a city that are not easily quantified. They make the city look like a nice place to live, which increases property values, and attracts labor to the workforce. (They still might not be worth it from a taxpayer's viewpoint.)
Dublin bikes is a huge success, but is heavily subsidised by a private firm in return for advertising space around the city, along with some local government investment.
All of you talking about this as a printer appear to have missed the point very slightly. This isn't a general purpose printer, its more like a personalized newspaper producer.
> All of you talking about this as a printer appear to have missed the point very slightly. This isn't a general purpose printer, its more like a personalized newspaper producer.
I think people are GETTING the point: "that stuff you prefer to view on a screen? Now you can pay a lot of money to get it in a less useful form-factor: paper!"
Well, history says different, and how things actually happened tends to have more weight than theoretical speculation about a perfect employment market.
It's a Red Queen Race: everyone's running as fast as they can to stay in the same place - and burning cash by the ton to do so. Red Queen races tend to be good for advancing the state of the art, but they're wasteful. And if you're trying to do something other than advance the state of the art, they're a trap.
Accepting "education is for a job" in the first place: you're lining your kids up to chase the biggest growth area of the last 20 years, when biotech is likely to be the most successful area in the next 20?
Or bioinfomatics or computational biology, where they're understanding current biology, not engineering new stuff?
You've discarded all of fundamental science, in favour of teaching your kids programming. Programming's important, but a physics degree _definitely_ teaches programming along with _how the universe works_. And stats. Lots and lots of stats. ",)
I'm just saying; you come across as a little short sighted, here.
It's certainly possible that biotech can be employed for the greater good. But I'm confident there will be a ton of competition for that relative sliver of jobs. I know several people with physics degrees. None of them do physics for a living. None could find a decent job doing it. Whereas programming is a very safe bet over the next 20 years, and is better taught by Python courses than physics.
I'd like schools to favor programming over physics and chemistry, but not ignore physics and chemistry altogether.
So you think schools should teach programming over fundamental science? As a very learned person said, "[physics] runs the shit that runs the shit that runs the shit that runs your shit!"
If you don't know physics, you don't know why there are fundamental limits to Moore's Law that we are rapidly approaching, for an example.
I took two years of physics classes. Virtually none of it applied to life. For example what good did it do me to calculate the trajectory of a projectile (multiple times, for homework, pop quiz, test, semi-final, and final)? We could've spent a fraction of the time on the concept and then been shown the equation for possible future reference, never to actually do a calculation. It would've served me much better to spend most of that time learning programming. I could've grasped fundamental limits to Moore's Law without ever doing a calculation of a projectile.
Nowadays physics is a hobby of mine, having entertainment value only. I can fully appreciate that "[physics] runs the shit..." but that doesn't pay the bills or get me to retirement.
Ballistics is occasionally interestingly counterintuitive, but perhaps that was overkill.
Bully for you. But it's the idea of prioritizing what is essentially a technician's job (yes, we call ourselves engineers; in reality, most of us are craftsmen) over knowing how the world works, and having some of the mental tools to figure stuff out that's confusing me.
Also, physics really rubbed in abstraction as a concept: "here's the atom, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it. Then this discovery was made. Here's the nucleus, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it..."
I do want schools to teach physics at a high level. As long as they'll get bogged down in minutia (as was my experience, and from what I've seen it's still the case) I'd rather they teach programming. Better they do Python functions than ballistics calculations. It's highly likely my kids will exit high school without having heard about relativity or quantum mechanics, except from me or info elsewhere.
How are we going to feed an ever-growing population?
How are we going to treat debilitating diseases that plague much of the world, in a cost-effective manner?
How are we going to improve the quality of life for all the people who are living longer lives?
How might we address unforeseen medical and nutritional crises?
You have a very short-sighted attitude. Which is not to even mention the impact that tying your approval of your children to the field in which they choose to work will have on them.
Point of information: the world population is currently predicted to peak at 11 billion, due to the rest of the world going through demographic transition. So not ever-growing - though 11 billion is definitely enough to cause problems...
Simple: don't have an ever-growing population. It can't ever grow in any case, so it's better to work toward stabilizing and then reducing it. Through attrition of course.
With a population significantly less than today's level, biotech isn't really needed. Without modern biotech people can live to be 80+ on average. That's good enough in my book. I support death (even my own, at 80+!), to keep the population fresh and keep the dictators dying. Overall, I'm confident the benefits of no biotech outweigh the negatives.
I don't think I could help being disappointed if a kid of mine chose to work in a job that did great harm to others, be it cigarettes or GMO food. That's kind of natural to feel that way.
Death doesn't really need your support, although it might appreciate the fanbase as it is usually not that popular on the whole, apart from with goths, although it tends to find them a bit embarrassing.
Nothing wrong with asking developers to think about what their creations are enabling. Let's not confuse the root cause though. The technology brings our shadow side out into the open. That same shadow side may itself allow for positive changes in society.
