Originally Posted by
wilfried
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.
Indeed, those are intimidating. Perhaps you are talking about after some expansion, but today those hills are irrelevant to CitiBike pricing as there are no docks north of the 130's and you're not allowed to keep one of their bikes overnight to ride back down the next morning.
They are perhaps an argument for a personal assist bike.
If they do expand up there, a reasonable argument could be made that anything beyond those hills should count as another boro.
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.
The thing is that the money is better spent on the solution that supports more people - perhaps there's a case for more train service at night. Tying up part of the public e-bike fleet to support a commute that already has a subsidized public option, at the time of day when the only for-all-bodies option that is using a private car is at its lowest impact, isn't really the best use of money for a society.
Whatever funding shuffle is going to keep e-bike prices low belongs on the e-bike rides that create the greatest reduction to traffic, capacity, and pollution problems - and those aren't the sparse late night commutes.
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.
When the goal is to get people to take the bike instead of the train, capping the price makes sense. But when providing the bike has real cost, then at hours where putting another rider on an underutilized train has essentially zero marginal cost, it makes no sense to cap the bike price below its actual share of the cost of operating the system - potentially including paying a few cents towards subsidizing the peak hours rides.
I'd take issue with a policy of closing bike routes at night - something there are some problematic examples of. But not subsidizing e-bikes at night (as an indirect result of not subsidizing the routes where they'd be uniquely useful then) is a case of policy planned for the maximum effect per dollar, not a restriction on personal choices.