Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.
New permitting and registration fees have killed off at least one bike-sharing company previously operating in Dallas, Texas.
Which means that instead of helping people commute, run errands, or visit friends, thousands of yellow bikes previously operated by Ofo, a Beijing-based bike-sharing firm, are now heaped in a city recycling center like a massive modernist monument to poor civic policy.
Ofo decided to pull out of Dallas after the city passed new rules requiring an $800 registration fee and permit fees of $21 per bike, according to The Dallas Morning News. While there were more than 20,000 shared bikes available in Dallas—including roughly 5,000 operated by Ofo—before the city’s new registration fee system went into effect, there are now only about 3,500 such bikes available, the paper reports.
Bike-sharing companies and other app-based transportation options like electric scooters have popped up in many major American cities over the past two years, offering a competitively priced alternative to struggling public transportation systems and ride-sharing services. They are hip, useful, and environmentally friendly—in other words, they are everything that city transit planners usually love, except for the fact that they are operated by private companies instead of as public monopolies.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Other than GRUBBING for money, what are the rational reasons to punish bike ride sharing companies?
Seattles about to see this as well. Rather then deal with these companies properly they too just raised the rates and forcing them slowly out of the city. unsure what is happening to the bikes here once the company leaves!
Never, never is it governments fault something fails. S.O.P.
Of course Dallas doesn’t want these bikes in the city because if people are using these bikes they are not using taxis which means the local politicians don’t get their kickback from the driver’s union. So they load up the bike share companies with tons of regulations that none of them can possibly adhere to and that way they go out of business on their own and the politicians just shake their heads and say sorry but although we support new businesses you just could not meet the requirements. One of those being the greasing of a few palms in the city government, of course they don’t say that out loud
Did someone say Oops?
Democrats in action.
Dumb idea, Chicago tried this and wasted tax dollars.