Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
The funding was NOT secured. An application had been sent in, but it was not approved until October. My only guess is that the Tribune made a mistake, or just wrote a lazily-worded article. In any event, that article comes from before Chicago had any money allocated to bikesharing, and so whatever it says cannot be taken as budgetary truth, but only the goal.
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I interpreted the article to mean that the bike sharing program it had detailed (i.e., 300 stations constructed during 2012)
would be implemented
if $18 million in funding for which the city had applied
were secured. (The article referenced this application process and that exact figure in the final paragraph.) And, at some point after the article was written, that funding—all $18 million—was indeed secured. So why would we assume the plan (for the construction of 300 stations in 2012) to have changed?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
Not at all. It's just that New York's goals and funding plans have been widely known for a long time, whereas Chicago's sort of materialized out of the blue, at least for me. At this point, I would say Chicago's plans are more concrete-looking than New York's, because New York is seemingly still negotiating with its sponsor.
It takes 3-4 months for Bixi to manufacture bikes and stations, ship them, and then get them installed. So if New York doesn't announce its sponsor in January it may have a hard time meeting that April goal for roll-out. Unless they decide to fork over public funding, which they could still do (and which the city of NY is almost certainly capable of doing on its own, if they must).
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Okay, that's clarifying. Thank you.