— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |
When it was announced last month that Avis was buying Zipcar for half an Instagram, I couldn't help but (briefly) wonder what their contribution to the ride-sharing service would be. Now we have a little bit of a hint: a nice, light sprinkling of “no bike parking” signage around the Mission!
While it instinctively seems 'pretty fucking dick' to be down on bikes in one of the most bike-friendly neighborhoods in a remarkably bike-friendly city, it does make pretty sound marketing sense. After all, it's pretty rude to remind their customer's that their business will be obsolete once we run out of oil. Or something.
Comments (27)
Bike = “Valuable”.
Take your bike with you, don’t leave it on the zipcar pole all day.
This is dumb because I ride my bike to go pick up the stupid Zipcar. I imagine for a company who’s market is non-car owning city dwellers, I’m not the only one.
I interpret the sign to mean “your bike will get stolen if you try to leave it here”.
My Zip is in my bike.
My Car is in my Car Car.
Zip Car is a dumb fuck.
City CarShare should exploit this by offering free bike lockers.
If you lock a bike to a zipcar pole, you might as well just hang a sign on it saying “I’m definitely not gonna be around to see you steal my bike, so please do the world a favor and steal this one instead of a smart person’s.”
If you lock your bike at the front of a parking space like that you are just asking for your bike to get damaged by the next “zipster” pulling in to the parking spot.
What’s wrong with zipcar? They’re renting those parking spaces, not you so don’t park your fucking bike there; the city has used our tax revenue to install lots and lots of bike racks, and even then there are street signs all over that are also suitable. Not every post belongs to cyclists, just like the sidewalks don’t belong to cyclists. I’m down with “BICYCLE RIGHTS!!!” but seriously, it’s not like the city belongs to cyclists.
70% of the city’s surface area is dedicated to the private automobile. But yeah you have such a grievance.
Oooh, are we playing “let’s make up completely bullshit statistics” today?! I love this game!
99% of bike riders ignore all traffic laws!
13% of car owners say they would happily run down a bicyclist if they thought they could get away with it!
47% of dog owners say they occasionally snack on their dog’s treats.
Red heads are 17% less likely to rob a bank, but 42% more likely to rob a liquor store.
This is fun!
The typical street has 2 15-foot sidewalks and roughly 50-60 feet for car parking and car traffic
Car therefore use 50 to 60 feet over a total of 80 to 90 feet
That’s roughly 60 to 70% dedicated to car traffic…
If you start by assuming 100% of the surface of San Francisco is roads, I guess that reasoning makes sense.
But merely looking out the window should be enough to convince you that this is far from the case.
Bingo. If the foundation of your argument is bullshit, then your end result is gonna be bullshit.
Nice the two biggest trolls back each other again.
If you need Herr or Eric for the rest of the night - they will be giving each other hand jobs in the bathroom at Benders.
Aww, poor baby, did you not get enough hugs as a child?
Wow, that’s all you got. Good one. Or, should it be +1 troll tech nerd?
Heh. You get exactly what you deserve. *shrug*
He obviously didn’t mean the entire surface area within city limits, but don’t let that stop the stupid semantics argument.
“70% of the city’s surface area is dedicated to the private automobile” Seems obvious to me.
Well, he SAID the entire surface area within the city. So, yeah, if he didn’t mean that, he shouldn’t have said that.
He was making shit up wholesale.
the typical car is about 6-7 feet wide
the typical bicycle is about 6-7 inches
therefore bicycles proportionally need .08 % of the space a car does.
Maybe your hipster ride with no proactically handlebars can squeeze through a 6-7 inch gap, but most of us need a lot more room than that.
I don’t know what kind of clown bike you are riding but a small bike seat is around 7 inches wide. My adult bike is 16 inches from pedal to pedal and the handlebars are 25 inches wide.
Seeing how 18% of S.F. is parkland your 70% leaves just 12% of the city for structures. http://cloud.tpl.org/pubs/ccpe_Acreage_and_Employees_Data_2010.pdf
Well, there are roads in parks, so adjust the derivative, of the logarythem of chai squared.
Plus I remember tearing up the grass in many parks with vehicles when I was a young punk.
That sign looks pretty valuable. We’d better take it with us.