Anarchy in Bike Lanes--and Housing Markets
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Nicole Gelinas joins Brian Anderson to discuss how cities with bike-sharing programs deal with theft and vandalism and how tech-based rental services like Airbnb are shaking up the housing market--and prompting new regulations.
Bike-sharing operators are pulling back their services as urban riders confront an old problem: nuisance crime. From Paris to Baltimore, vandalism of bikes is widespread. In San Francisco and Portland, protests against gentrification sometimes take the form of wholesale property destruction of bikes. By contrast, New York and London remain unaffected by large-scale disruptions of their bike-share programs.
In its 10 years of existence, Airbnb has transformed urban life, making it easier for travelers to book rooms on shortnotice. Yet the company has also aroused opposition, with dozens of cities around the world enacting laws to crack down on its operations over the last few years.
Read Nicole Gelinas's story, "Cycle of Violence," in the Spring 2018 Issue of City Journal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. We're back with another edition of 10 blocks. This is your host, Brian Anderson. I'm the editor of |
| 0:23.8 | City Journal. Our guest today is Nicole Jelineus. Nicole's a contributing editor of City Journal, |
| 0:29.7 | a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and you can follow her on Twitter at Nicole |
| 0:34.6 | Julinus. She's recently written, Cycle of Violence, a short piece on |
| 0:40.2 | quality of life and urban bikes. It's available on our website, www.com, city-gernel.org, and in our |
| 0:48.5 | spring 2018 issue. Nicole, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, Brian. First off, since some of our |
| 0:55.4 | listeners don't live in urban areas, or even if they do, could never imagine renting a bike |
| 1:00.9 | to get around the city, can you talk about how bike sharing programs like New York's work, |
| 1:06.4 | who pays for them, and what some of the differences are between different programs and different cities? |
| 1:11.7 | Sure. Well, bike sharing has been a Western phenomenon now for more than a decade, so it's not |
| 1:18.3 | really very new anymore. First started up in France, in Paris popularized it, and then made |
| 1:24.7 | its way to London, New York. It's all over China, almost any big global |
| 1:30.7 | city you can think of has some sort of bike sharing program. And the way it works is that rather than |
| 1:37.6 | have to bring your own bike into an urban area and have to chain it up and worry that it gets |
| 1:42.9 | stolen or parts of it get stolen or you |
| 1:44.9 | won't find a place to park it. The city allocates space for what's known as bike docks where |
| 1:51.9 | you take a municipal bike. You either pay by the year or by the day, depending on how often you're |
| 1:58.8 | going to use it. And for that fee, you can use the bike for |
| 2:03.4 | half an hour or 45 minutes for a short trip. So you take it out of one dock with your little |
| 2:08.7 | key card, and then you return it to a different dock once you've completed your journey. So they're not |
| 2:13.9 | meant to be recreational bikes. You know, if you want to ride around Central Park for a few hours or do the bike path up |
| 2:22.5 | the Hudson River, you'd really have your own bike to do that because you're not really |
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