By: Diane Benjamin
The email was included in the latest FOIA from Normal. This email is about the bike share program.
Evidently Town policy is:
If we think you need it we will force you to subsidize it!
By: Diane Benjamin
The email was included in the latest FOIA from Normal. This email is about the bike share program.
Evidently Town policy is:
If we think you need it we will force you to subsidize it!
Institutional insanity driven by an unaccountable out-of-control administration who can’t spend your money fast enough on worthless BS.
What a deal for Zagster?! A guaranteed check no matter how few customers use the actual service. This business model is predicated on having towns like Normal that place political ideology over the care and stewardship of taxpayer money. If Zagster or any competing company believed that they could make a profit on bike-sharing, they’d directly collect the revenue from each rider, pay expenses (marketing, COGS, salaries, R&D, etc.), and at least break even. This was never going to work. There’s next to no demand for these bikes in BN. Just another bullet point in the “ammenties” section of the ISU admissions brochure brought to you courtesy of the local taxpayers.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpaying citizens of Normal. They apparently do not know this, or they know and are thumbing their noses at us. I tend to believe it’s not the former. Enriching their fellow progressive marxist democrats at OUR expense is much more important than anything else.
How do some bikes in a rack, that people rent manage to cost the city more than they bring in? I mean seriously? WHERE is all of the expense. HOW can several thousand dollars not cover the cost of the program? Are people destroying a lot of bikes so they need new ones all the time? Are the locks crap and people are stealing them? (I can’t see this since they are ugly bikes IMO) As usual, somebody is a total idiot or several somebodies more likely.
This is ANOTHER one of those “utopian” brainstorms that probably get thrown around those “Mayors conferences” so it makes it “appear” that the mayor is actually learning SOMETHING, but you can’t teach an OLE DOG new tricks, as they say.
It’s also another one of those things that probably have some success in say, Boulder, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, San Francisco and most ANY other town where “old hippies go to die” so the people who make it successful there, get a “movement” going and make everyone think it’s the coolest thing since VW made the “beetle” And the “idiots that be” buy into it with OUR tax money.. when actually it’s the stupidest thing since the Edsel..