Geezer with a Grudge: Bike Sharing Anyone?

Feb 5, 2015

Bike Sharing Anyone?

Here’s a press release I received from BlancFleet: Dear Editor,

We want to radically change how enthusiasts nationwide gain access to newer bikes in the market. Today, riders have two options, own a bike outright or rent one. Owning a bike offers freedoms renting cannot, but it also limits the number of bikes an enthusiast will enjoy on the road in his lifetime. Renting also has its problems, cash deposit requirements, mile limit requirements, insurance requirements, and in most cases, renters only have access to an older fleet of bikes.

We want to change this through sharing and crowdfunding. The latter allows bike enthusiasts to raise money for new bikes they want to experience on the road and then share them between the pool of buyers. We believe sharing + crowdfunding together is the future and Blancfleet is paving the road forward that will connect bike enthusiasts everywhere to make buying a new bike more cost effective and accessible to everyone. Blancfleet also wants to remove cash deposit requirements, mile limit and insurance requirements on each bike funded through our platform so buyers simply enjoy the fleet of bikes they helped fund.

We want to expand Blancfleet nationwide and in the future globally.

If you believe your readers would benefit from our bike sharing program, we invite you to write about us.

Best,
Charles Polanco
Founder and CEO of Blancfleet

I can see this as the wave of the future for auto-piloted cars. I don’t quite get it for motorcycles.

3 comments:

Andy Mckenzie said...: "Blancfleet also wants to remove cash deposit requirements, mile limit and insurance requirements on each bike funded through our platform so buyers simply enjoy the fleet of bikes they helped fund."

So what they're saying is, "we want to buy up a lot of brand new bikes, and then let uninsured people who can't afford to rent a bike ride them as much as they want."

I don't think I'd want to be involved in that, and I CERTAINLY wouldn't want to ride one of those bikes without having my own mechanic check it out. I imagine they're planning to charge membership fees high enough to replace those bikes when uninsured riders flip them over a guard-rail somewhere, which probably means I couldn't afford to ride them anyway.; 2/6/15, 8:13 AM
Paul Y said...: And the possibility of getting pulled over your first day on the bike - "We have a report of a bike matching this description and license number...".
Or being far from home when the engine packs it in because the last user liked to ride mile long wheelies and flogged it mercilessly.; 2/6/15, 6:33 PM
T.W. Day said...: What a bunch of realistic buzz-killers. ;-) I'm not even sure this is a too-little-too-late idea. I was wrong about Amazon, though.; 2/9/15, 1:48 PM

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.