Bike Green wants to saturate downtown St. Petersburg with free bikes

Brent Bruns and Andrew Blikken have an ambitious plan: inspired by free-bike programs in Europe, they want to flood downtown St. Petersburg with 8,000 bright green bicycles for the public to use for free. The program, BikeGreen, is funded by $.25 Altoid machines scattered around town as well as from donations.

Sound familiar? It's been done in Tampa Bay before. The Tampa Downtown partnership put 50 orange bikes on the street in 1997 and they vanished within a week. Eckerd College has a similar program with their yellow bikes on campus. Most ended up destroyed, abandoned or locked away behind a fence, though the bikes seem to be enjoying more success lately. Bruns says he realizes many of the bikes will disappear quickly: he's planning on losing 1,000 per month. The thought is that by providing so many bikes, the demand will simply overwhelm the desire to steal them.

What's not clear is where these bikes are going to come from and how they will be maintained. Donated bikes spray-painted green and maintained by volunteers will be of marginal operational quality at best. Trying to turn people on to cycling as a practical means of transportation is not likely to be accomplished by broken bicycles. Paid bike rental programs like Velib in Paris are still the most rational business model to make a program like this succeed.

I'll keep you posted on the future of BikeGreen and I wish it the best of luck, but it seems the program has a long way to go.

Comments

[Chip Haynes]

This is a tough one. I think, honestly, I'd rather see them spend the money to put decent bicycle racks in front of every building downtown. I do think that might do more to promote practical bicycling in St. Pete.

Still, I do wish them luck.

[Ghost Rider]

I'm with Chip -- there's a better way to spend that money, and that's by creating better bike parking and bike-friendly infrastructure.

I applaud these guys for trying to do SOMETHING, but I wonder if any such program has had more than a couple months' success before the bikes were all lost, abandoned or destroyed? I sure haven't heard of any long-term "yellow bike" programs that worked!

[Chip Haynes]

How about cheaper than bike racks: Convince employers to offer incentives to their employees that pedal to work. Let them park their bikes right next to their desks. The bikes stay safe and they free up parking.

You're welcome.

[Kimberly]

To get employers (businesses) to support bicycling, we need to let business owners know they will benefit.

(1) Cars cost about $10,000.00 per year to own and operate in Tampa Bay (Drain on driving, St. Pete Times, Tues., Feb. 12, 2008). I, as a car-free bicyclist, have $10,000.00 of disposable income. $10,000.00 times 10% of St. Pete's population equals almost $250,000,000.00.

(2) As a car-free bicyclist, I can still afford to buy clothes, restaurant meals, buy the newspaper, etc.

(3) When gas gets to $6.00, I'll still be able to afford "driving" to work.

[Kimberly]

I've been at the blog The Fueling Station http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/ .

You might want to go on there & add your bicycling 2 cents. ...Help give them options besides cars. Be gentle, cautious. Give tiny tips.

In the 1970s & 1980s, I was clawing to afford a car. Gave it up as too expensive. A lot of people are clawing to afford cars now. They need some help thinking out of the car-trap.

It's such a relief, load off the shoulders when you dump the money-hogging car!