Originally Posted by
CoachPerry19
If you take some time to read the article you get with the inevitable dribble
Indeed, it wouldn't be streetsblog without a large helping of such - this article seemed to have relatively few leaps of illogic compared to their usual.
I live in the Connecticut RIver Valley as it runs between NH and VT and within a 30 minute drive I can go to five agencies and co-ops that will give anybody a refurbished bike for free.
Not that far south of you and the used market seems to be slim pickings, a fact that's comes up frequently in local forums. That said, the article was actually talking about NYC in particular.
So the question of a gap that just HAS to be closed is rubbish. The author runs a bike-coop and guess what he wants funding for...?
Bike co-ops are part of the solution - as you pointed out above yourself - but I don't see that being pushed as the only solution. A bit part of it was pointing out how the current offerings of the bike box stores are part of the problem, rather than a solution.
Could always try to get a bike the old fashioned way? Save your money and buy one.
Saving is indeed "old fashioned" in today's culture - and even in income tiers where it shouldn't be. I hesitate to be too critical of low wage (and in more than a few cases, under the table wage) people not managing to do what plenty of folks with salaried jobs, houses, and multiple cars aren't managing to do either.
There's a huge gap between having the funds available to do something but deciding you can't afford to, to not having the funds and having no way to do it, to not having the funds and going ahead and doing it with ready consumer credit - I suspect we're getting to the point where many individuals live their whole lives in one of those categories with little more than a dim awareness that the other categories even exist.