Portland's "NIKE Biketown" is a horrible system. The bikes are expensive to rent at 2.50 for a 30 minute trip, which costs the same as a 2.5 hour bus pass, $12 a day which is more expensive then a 24 hour $5 bus pass, or one can pay $12 a month for 90 minutes of ride time a day with unlimited trips, a monthly bus pass is $100 with unlimited rides for the month. If one needs a bike daily it would be much cheeper to buy a bike or pick one up free/cheap on craigslist and use it for free.
The orange NIKE biketown bikes are heavy clunky awful things burdened with a large card reader that must add 10 pounds to the weight of the bike, they are hard to get up to a decent speed to negotiate traffic, and in wet Portland the bikes spend most of the year, 8-9 months, rusting in their stupid road narrowing parking units that remove parking in areas it's needed. These space consumptive parking units obstruct pedestrian and disabled access to the sidewalks, and stick so far out into traffic that a driver must put their car into traffic to see if they can cross or turn with the risk of getting T-boned or hitting a pedestrian being quite high. The NIKE biketown bikes are a big joke in the city, and only tourists use them. Anyone who actually bikes in the city will get their own bike so they can do things like add enough lights and reflectors to be seen on stormy nights. After a year of this nonsense I have only seen one of the orange bikes in use, but I see their awful parking units all over full of bikes and making the streets less safe for pedestrians, cars, and real bike commuters.
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Portland's "NIKE Biketown" is a horrible system. The bikes are expensive to rent at 2.50 for a 30 minute trip, which costs the same as a 2.5 hour bus pass, $12 a day which is more expensive then a 24 hour $5 bus pass, or one can pay $12 a month for 90 minutes of ride time a day with unlimited trips, a monthly bus pass is $100 with unlimited rides for the month. If one needs a bike daily it would be much cheeper to buy a bike or pick one up free/cheap on craigslist and use it for free.
The orange NIKE biketown bikes are heavy clunky awful things burdened with a large card reader that must add 10 pounds to the weight of the bike, they are hard to get up to a decent speed to negotiate traffic, and in wet Portland the bikes spend most of the year, 8-9 months, rusting in their stupid road narrowing parking units that remove parking in areas it's needed. These space consumptive parking units obstruct pedestrian and disabled access to the sidewalks, and stick so far out into traffic that a driver must put their car into traffic to see if they can cross or turn with the risk of getting T-boned or hitting a pedestrian being quite high. The NIKE biketown bikes are a big joke in the city, and only tourists use them. Anyone who actually bikes in the city will get their own bike so they can do things like add enough lights and reflectors to be seen on stormy nights. After a year of this nonsense I have only seen one of the orange bikes in use, but I see their awful parking units all over full of bikes and making the streets less safe for pedestrians, cars, and real bike commuters.
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