»In which we ride the red bike

Bicing, the popular Barcelonabike- sharing scheme, might come to New York. And so
our newspaper of record:

Barbara Held lives in Barcelona but is from Buffalo, Minn. She lived in New York before moving to Spain 15 years ago. Ms. Held stopped by the SoHo art gallery to visit friends. She did not need to test the program because she participates in the one in Barcelona. She had her bike card in her purse. It was the size of a credit card. An image of a red bicycle with the word Bicing, the name of Barcelona’s program, is on the front of the card. Barcelona started its program in March with 1,500 bicycles and 100 stations.

“The city didn’t think it would take off,” Ms. Held said. “But the program is so popular. People ride the red bikes all the time.”

I have doubts; as the story notes, vandalism and theft are rampant, and the sense of community is not strong enough to maintain a program of sharing such as this. I have recently seen a similar program enacted at a large company (not a university, but similiar in concept and spirit), which runs a massive corporate "campus" in Silicon Valley spread across a mile long and hundreds of yards across. The company deployed dozens of cruiser-style bicycles, unfettered, in order to promote easy movement amongst buildings. The repairs, theft, and rebalancing are all tricky: nightly sweeps are necessary to identify broken equipment (as people have no ownership of the bicycles, they casually discard them when broken, or perhaps even treat them as disposable); to retrieve discarded, misplaced, and far-afield equipment (users have taken the bicycles to the nearby towns, to far-away towns, and even to their own houses); and to ensure that a reasonable mix of equipment is available at the beginning of the next day. These are important and difficult obstacles that New York will need to overcome in order to have such a program become effective. Tying it to the MTA, as Paris and San Francisco are proposing, and requiring an annual membership plus a nominal usage fee, might make this more feasible.