Originally Posted by
UniChris
So basically it's $2 for a bridge commute into or out of Manhattan, but potentially more for trips within the island.
That has some folks upset, but I'm not sure I agree - I think it covers where the assist bikes make sense, while charging more for where they don't.
Pedaling a bike has health benefits, so that makes sense as public policy even if it isn't the most efficient way to move the population around.
That may be true, until they get all the way up to the northern tip of Manhattan. Then there are some
hills . I ride up the one on Broadway between 191st and 181st about weekly, and it's more intense than any bridge.
But if we're going to move people around the city with electric motors, in areas with good coverage the subway's electric motors are probably better public policy than individual e-vehicles, even if those vehicles are bike-sized. Especially as long as charging requires staff to catch up to the bike at a dock, it really doesn't seem like these can compete with the subway, except where the subway is overloaded or doesn't go.
There might be a case to be made for incentivizing longer trips. More options that are not a car is good. So, say you have three choices:
1. Long, unpredictable, train ride with transfer (made longer and less predictable late at night)
2. Long bike ride, but shorter and more predictable than the train, but hard work, but made much easier by ebike.
3. Uber
A bike ride replacing a car ride is good thing.
dendawg indicates that ebikes would have made option 2 possible, rather than option 3. Long bikes trips might be most likely to replace car trips, which is a good thing, so making option two cheap and easy with ebikes is a good thing.
I'm not sure what the right pricing is. $4.50 for a long ebike ride is still a lot cheaper than $34 for Uber, so maybe that's good enough. Would making the bike ride a couple bucks cheaper make more people choose option 2? Maybe cap the price at train fare? Price not-car transportation transportation the same. I've always found it strange an annoying in other cities where the bike share option is more expensive than the public transit option, or the day pass was expensive enough that it would take a whole bunch of rides to make each ride equal to a transit ride.