Dan Maes "ad" portrays John Hickenlooper as Evil Comrade of Bicycling/United Nations dupe

• Danielle: Use for no more than thirty minutes is free, but if you use a B-cycle for an additional hour, you are charged $3.30 for that hour, not $1.10. If you use a B-cycle for three hours, you are charged $8.80 for the third hour, not $1.10. B-cycle is priced this way based on the idea that it can be promoted as not impinging on bike shops daily rental business -- it is true that an aware consumer (not quite an oxymoron) would seek out a bike shop rather than getting socked with the $65 B-cycle daily (or nine-hour) rent, but B-cycle depends for its $70,000 monthly cost on consumers who AREN'T aware, or are careless, or both -- I call that predatory and corporate, and it damn well is not bike-sharing! Take donations, use public funds in the amount of just a few months of the cost of B-cycle and put the proceeds into a citywide, cooperative, staff; volunteers; and vocational student-operated bike-sharing program. Such a system might still charge fees on weekly bike rentals. It is true that a totally free system is problematic, but an ID system can be implemented very cheaply -- simply add bike privileges to Denver Public Library cards, e.g. How much further Denver could bike, for how much less, remains to be discovered.

• Oh ya and http://www.westword.com/slideshow/denver-cruisers-u-n-bike-ride-in-honor-of-dan-maes-30920843/

• Hey Robert, I don't consider $1.10 per hour exorbitant (especially when under 30 min is free). Some even say, it's convenient. Pricing break down: http://denver.bcycle.com/pricing.aspx This video is, at the very least, hilarious!

• Dan's offhand comment about Hickenlooper's bike program shows he's more in tune than most people believe. Time to get yourselves informed as to what we're dealing with. "New World Order" is code for bringing all nations under U.N. CONTROL. As in 'fundamentally transforming the United States of America". http://freemenow.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/artificial-paradise-inc-agenda-21/

• This dead horse has been beaten for far too long. Are Maes' bizarre associations relating to B-cycle really so amusing? ('O Fortuna' hardly calls to mind Stalin, either.) What really bothers me is that there is nothing about this or about B-cycle which burnishes Hick's sorry record -- he did not institute a program of bike-sharing in Denver, but an expensive bike-rental scheme which is being misrepresented as bike-sharing. Maes may be delusional and hostile to bike-sharing in principle, but Hickenlooper promulgates the lie that a credit card based bike rental system which costs $70,000 per month to operate and is driven by exorbitant rates on all but brief rides is bike-sharing -- I'm not sure who is worse for the cause of appropriate transportation.

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