Decatur Won’t Participate in Atlanta Bike Share Program For Now
Decatur Metro | March 5, 2014 | 9:54 am
You may recall the Atlanta-Decatur Bike Share Feasibility Study that was released in January 2013, which got folks buzzing about a bike share program that stretched across Atlanta and into downtown Decatur. Don’t recall? You can still pour over it’s PDFed pages HERE.
All caught up? You also may have heard just a month or so ago, that Atlanta was moving forward with the purchase of 500 bikes that will be installed at 57 locations around the city.
“So what about Decatur?”, Peter recently asked us.
City Planning Director Amanda Thompson tells DM that Decatur is not involved in Atlanta’s bike share at this point and doesn’t have plans of participating in the next fiscal year. Says Ms. Thompson, “It is still quite expensive to operate and we would need to identify a source of funding.”
Graphic courtesy of AtlantaBicycleShare.com
Thanks for the follow-up, DM! Given all of the pots in the fire, including talk of building more bike lane infrastructure, I can’t say I’m surprised. It’ll be interesting to see if they reconsider it in a couple to few years when more lanes have been implemented and Atlanta has run it for a while or just say meh.
Says Ms. Thompson, “It is still quite expensive to operate and we would need to identify a source of funding.”
here’s how you fund it: sell branded bike sponsorships
http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/citi-bike-nyc-bike-share-program-537×426.jpg
I was at a meeting last month (monthly breakfast for bike commuters) where representatives of the company negotiating their contract with the city of Atlanta attended, They mentioned that the contract allows sponsors, but does not allow advertising. Apparently it is one of the distinctions (what is the distinction?) that they are trying to work out,
The NY bike racks sure are easy to spot with the “sponsor” logo all over it!
interesting. so much depends on their definition of advertising. in my opinion, the arrangement NYC has with Citi is one of branding, not advertising—the (only) creative they’re allowed is their logo and brand color, which is nothing to sniff at: over 42,000, blue Citi Bike trips happen each day in NYC, and on a relative scale, our bikes would offer a similar quality of brand exposure here.
my friends at Coca-Cola are looking for ways to activate associations of health with their cola brand(s). i can’t think of a more compelling way to accomplish that locally than sponsoring a fleet of 100 red Commi Bikes for the Peoples Republic of Decatur.
viva la revolutions!
I thought Decatur had already tried this. With the end result that all the bikes were stolen.
No?
That was Yellow Bike. I believe it differed in some respects from the Bike Share program, most notably in that Yellow Bike accepted donated bikes whereas Bike Share requires OPM to buy brand new bikes, mostly for people who can easily afford their own. But yes, Yellow Bike ended as a result of theft, IRRC.
What would you like us to pour over the pages?
Sincerely yours,
The Grammar Nazi
+1
You help me feel less alone in the world.
Four years of Latin in high school. There you go.
“Four years of Latin in high school.”
Sentence fragment.
No. It’s the title of my memoir.
Don’t get me started on the proper use of “momentarily”.
If you guys were really passionate about this you’d do more than just correct. You’d teach. Here are my initial questions – Why do the noun and verb of forms of “pore” have such dramatically different definitions? Totally separate derivations? What are the derivations?
Poor defense.
If you were really interested in learning, you’d be Googling now instead of poking us.
Already did, but wanted to see how much you really cared.
Is Middle English what Hobbits speak?
So if I read this correctly, the noun “pore” is from the Greek “poros” and the verb “pore” is from the 13th century Middle English “pouren” – which is of obscure origin. Incidently, “pouren” is also the origin of “pour”. So it seems to me that an argument can be made that these two spellings could theoretically be used interchangeably and the only reason not to do so is a random, relatively recent precedent.
If only we could revert back to when there were no standard spellings for English words…
Agreed. I prefer to view my misspellings and grammatical errors as blows against tyranny, a la Noah Webster.
I just hope it’s one of those really hard words they’re going to drop from the SAT exam.
The timed writing part of the SAT was never a great idea IMHO. Good writing is one of the most important skills in life but it is not best measured by standardized testing. It takes lots of sweat, revision, sweat, and revision until it’s ready, whether it takes an hour or 5 hours or 5 days. I never thought it should be a timed item. So I’m all for going back to just Verbal and Math, for a maximum total of 1600 points. Most colleges were giving less weight to the writing section of the SAT anyway. But I’m not sure I like the dumbing down of the vocabulary part. Who’s to say what’s a useful vs. a pedantic word? And taking away the negative points for wrong answers is just plain wrong. That was my favorite part–guessing whether I should guess or not! I’m not sure what skill that measures but I had it down!
The test is designed to correlate with success in college. If the test still provides that correlation, who cares?
We’ll see if new version does a better job. The last major shift was evidently not as successful as hoped. In listening to NPR, I gather there are many reasons for the change, some of which have to do with the ability of the test to predict college success, some of which have to do with evening the playing field for students who can’t afford the hundreds of dollars of test prep that many college applicants are spending, and some of which have to do with market share.
If I were changing the SAT and ACT, I’d get rid of the time pressure. I think it’s an unnecessary stress and irrelevant to the college and work world in which you work hard until the job is done, however long it takes to do the best job. The ability to guess well under a time pressure, while lots of fun for us good testers, Jeopardy-loving types, is not the most important academic skill. The test is discriminating on the wrong skill. Of course, eliminating the time pressure would make the test harder to administrate and then more costly……..hmmm. Maybe something like MAP testing that is not timed, but rather a response-driven online test? Some professional exams are designed that way.
The test was originally designed to be administered to students who had already been admitted to college, for purposes of guidance and counseling. (It was based on an IQ test used by the army in WW I to determine which soldiers were officer material.) Mostly vocabulary, with some math questions and some that had to do with identifying shapes. In the 1930s, Harvard got a middle-class president who wanted to recruit public school students from the Midwest, to dilute the upper-crustiness. He started using the SAT to award scholarships. The other Ivies jumped on the bandwagon, a few decades later Kaplan started selling test prep, and the whole thing turned into a huge industry. Ironically, it wound up becoming the kind of socio-economic barrier that old Harvard president had been trying to counteract.
See “The Big Score” in the March 3 New Yorker.
Fascinating. Of note, many competitive colleges are “test-optional” now. They felt that this move would encourage more diversity in applicants. Evidently, the colleges think that they can use grades, recommendations, and maybe course rigor–e.g. how many AP courses you too–to make equally good judgments about college performance. Some even have collected data that back up their conclusions. I’m still adjusting to what seems like a radical idea. I worry that the “softer” data are more open to subjective and biased interpretation. But the “objective” measures turn out not to be so objective anyway.
Also, its not it is.
Ha. Love you guys!
My sincere apology for the thread hijack.