greening st. pete

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could grab a spare bicycle at The Pier in St. Pete, and ride it to Tropicana Field for a ballgame, where someone else could use that same bike to get to the Dali Museum?  Once the Rays finish beating the Yankees, you could pick up another spare bicycle outside, and ride over to Baywalk, and put it in the bike rack with a handful of other bikes available to anyone to use for free.

Awesome idea, huh?  And the (turn down audio before clicking!) Green Bike Initiative wants to do just that:

Seeking to fill a niche need within our community, St. Pete’s Bike GREEN initiative was launched in March 2008 by cycling enthusiasts around Pinellas County. Having seen successful Public Utility Bike (PUB) programs in a number of European and American cities, founders Andrew Blikken and Brent Bruns decided the time had come for their own community to benefit from such an initiative.

It will never work.

The Tampa Downtown Partnership tried a similar program 10 years ago.  All 50 of the hideous orange bikes were stolen within a week.

Even Bike GREEN knows it.  In an interview with Big 13, BikeGreen.info founder Brent Bruns expects problems:

“We’re anticipating a thousand bikes to be stolen each month for six months, which is why we are launching with 8,000.”

Holy cow! – You’re telling me that you are going to flood downtown St. Pete with 8,000 green bicycles?  Imagine that for a second.  And then you expect 1,000 to be stolen each month for six months!  What happens in month 7?  Do people get bored with stealing bicycles every day?

And just how on earth are they raising money for 8,000 bicycles?  The obvious – they are selling handfuls of Altoids for $.25 each from vending machines.

This has success written all over it.