Atrios --
The culture clash in NYC over bikes is pretty amusing, though I really don't get why they drive some people so insane. More than that, I really don't understand longtime New Yorkers (and I mean people in the dense transit and taxi rich bits, mostly Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn), choose to have personal car-centric lives.
One difference between those dense bits of Manhattan and Brooklyn relative to the corresponding parts of Paris and London -- from which the bike rental idea was imported -- is that way more actual city residents are in those places, whereas they've been priced out in the European metropolises. Thus the routines of daily life in a congested city -- needing to get to 5 different places to complete what would be a single errand in the suburbs -- have a lot more weight in how people think about transport in New York. And rental bikes don't help a lot with that, so the locals are not going to be especially excited about them.
The culture clash in NYC over bikes is pretty amusing, though I really don't get why they drive some people so insane. More than that, I really don't understand longtime New Yorkers (and I mean people in the dense transit and taxi rich bits, mostly Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn), choose to have personal car-centric lives.
One difference between those dense bits of Manhattan and Brooklyn relative to the corresponding parts of Paris and London -- from which the bike rental idea was imported -- is that way more actual city residents are in those places, whereas they've been priced out in the European metropolises. Thus the routines of daily life in a congested city -- needing to get to 5 different places to complete what would be a single errand in the suburbs -- have a lot more weight in how people think about transport in New York. And rental bikes don't help a lot with that, so the locals are not going to be especially excited about them.