Remember how Austin and some other American cities left yellow-painted bicycles lying around for anyone to use? And how they were all stolen in a few weeks?

Then Portland said, “Let’s do what Paris does: Rent bikes. Anyone who pays a monthly rental fee gets a key and can unlock and use bikes whenever they want.”

Bikes for rent in Paris.
Flickr photo by CeesOK.

That program turned out to be highly successful in Paris. At least, if you don’t count the fact that over half the bikes were stolen in 18 months, and most of the rest had to be replaced due to vandalism. So much for another great scheme for collective transportation.

Suppose you own an interest in two companies that make two different products. One of them is wildly successful. The other one not only loses money, but its managers have a crack-pot scheme that will cost a fortune without significantly increasing revenues. What do you do?

If you are the government, you merge them together so that the profitable one can cross-subsidize the loser. (Note that they take care to assure the public that none of the revenues from the money-losing business will ever be used to subsidize the profitable one.)

Washington Metro expects to have a $154 million deficit next year. It hopes to cover half of that by cutting 313 jobs and “trimming other administrative expenses.” The rest will have to come from service cuts, so it is proposing to shut down the subways at 10 o’clock at night.

As someone named h gracy says in the comments on the Washington Post story, this is a classic Washington Monument strategy. As previously noted here, that strategy was named when the Park Service, facing budget cuts in 1968, closed the elevator to the Washington Monument and directed irate tourists to make the complaints to their local members of Congress.

So, effectively, what Metro is saying is, “Give us more money or we will cut off your nightlife at 10 pm.” No doubt congressional staffers will respond to that!

Sunset magazine editor and New York Times blogger Allison Arieff asks, “what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we are left with” when everyone moves out of the suburbs and back to the cities? (Click here for part 2.)

“So what to do with the abandoned houses,” she goes on to say, “the houses that were never completed or the land that was razed for building and now sits empty?” All the Antiplanner can say is that being an editor of Sunset doesn’t qualify someone to understand the housing crisis.