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Public-private balance is a hard philosophical question! If you're trying to make a big policy change like the grid of bike streets you mentioned, it'd help to have a tech company like Lyft and their marketing $$$ behind the change instead of opposing it, but I wonder how the average NYer would feel about any given policy that appears backed by "big tech."

It looks like Lyft has most of the big city bike-shares under operation. In the smaller cities I've visited (e.g. Cincinnati, Indianapolis, even Jackson, WY), B-Cycle seems to be the operator of choice. If you know anyone there, it'd be cool to hear about the challenges of running a bike-share in small cities and how the parent company (which seems to be a bike manufacturer, not a tech company) made the reverse adjustment Lyft did, adding an app instead of adding hardware.

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i actually wrote a paper for my grad program on the role of partnerships in shaping urban sustainability with e-scooter deployment in alexandria, va, as a case study. (i figured if i had to write academic papers i might as well get some use out of them.) maybe will publish excerpts of that for a future oversharing! b-cycle is also a great shout.

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