Bixi Est En Faillite; En Vive Citibike

Scarcely a day goes by without the New York Post or Faux--I mean Fox--news bashing the Citibike program.

A while back, New York magazine published a tongue-in-cheek article and Venn diagram suggesting reasons why "conservatives" "hate" Citibike and all other bike share programs.  One of the reasons given is that they perceive the program as "vaguely French."  

Bicycles in Montreal's bike-sharing program.

I put the word "conservative" in quotations because my understanding of the term is not necessarily what the author of the article seems to think it is.  And, among them, they don't all "hate" the program, or bicycles:  I know, and have known conservatives who are avid cyclists.

But folks who fit the writer's perception of the term--which I take to mean the editors of the Post and the Fox crowd--may be waiting with bated breath for a shoe to drop.

You see, Public Bike System Company, the Montreal firm that designed the Citibikes and their ports, has filed for bankruptcy.  Apparently, Citibike and the Chicago bike share programs didn't make payments to the company because glitches that resulted in difficulty or impossibility in taking bikes from, or returning them to, their ports.   

BSC, also known as Bixi, administers the bike share program in Montreal and supplies bikes and other equipment for the programs in a number of cities, including New York and Chicago.  

Citibike and New York City government officials said that BSC's bankruptcy shouldn't affect Citibike's current operations.  However, one has to wonder whether expansion of the program into other parts of the city (including my neighborhood, Astoria, and other parts of Queens) will be put on hold or cancelled altogether.
 

Yesterday's Ride, Today's Storm

I am so glad I took my ride yesterday.  I thought I’d sneak in a short ride this morning.  But the snow started earlier than had been forecast:  When I woke up, just before 8 am, the wind was already driving needles of cotton against my window and the faces of people ploughing ahead on their way to work or school.  They weren’t supposed to encounter such weather conditions until the time most of them would have been going home.  Not surprisingly, some of them returned early to the warmth and comfort of their hot cocoa and friends, lovers, pets, books, TV shows and videos.

Pedaling as soft, puffy flakes eddy onto my shoulders would not have been bad.  But the conditions I saw this morning would are the sort you envision in a Dickens story or, perhaps, a Bergmann film. I have mentioned, in previous posts, other meteorological “lines in the sand” I’ve drawn.  For example, I am sometimes willing to ride in the snow or rain, but not when both are falling—or when they’re accompanied by sleet.  I also generally don’t ride if I can barely see out my window or if the morning commute looks like the Battle of Stalingrad.  

Well, I don’t know what the Battle of Stalingrad looked like.  For that matter, I don’t know, exactly, what a Dickensian morning looks like, though his writing and my imagination create a vivid image.  But I have seen morning in a Bergmann film.  Anyway, you know what I mean.

Days like today aren’t for riding, at least for me.  But I can bask in the glow of yesterday’s ride.  

Looking Out For Whitelaw

Today was mild, if not exceptionally so, for this time of year.  The temperature reached 46F (8C).  The skies were overcast and a breeze from the west occasionally gusted.

It was all good enough for me to go for a bike ride.  And, given that today is a holiday (the day on which Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is observed), I had time for a longish ride.

So what did I do?  I rode to Point Lookout:  105 km (65 miles) round-trip—on my fixed gear.  The ride is flat, but it’s still longer than I might normally do at this time of year.  So I’m feeling good about that.  Perhaps I am in better shape than I thought I was, and that bulge I feel in my belly is a paranoid delusion. (Dream on!)

Of course, these guys (or girls:  I, of all people, should not be sexist!) are always in shape.  How could they not be?

And they’re more intrepid than I am:  When the snowstorm we’re supposed to get arrives tomorrow, they’ll still be flying around, swooping down and scooping up food for which people pay good money in nearby restaurants.  Meanwhile, I’ll be in my place, preparing  syllabi for the coming semester and, possibly, soup or tomato sauce.

The avian avatars will miss out on such experiences—and the irony of seeing this on Martin Luther King Jr’s holiday:

I wonder if residents of the neighborhood—Ozone Park, Queens—have ever noticed.  At one time, not so long ago, they were all white.  (I know; I had relatives who lived there!) Now many of them are South Asian and/or Caribbean.  Did they have “Whitelaw” in their old countries?