After reading this, I feel like I've been bukkaked with stupid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSrh7o-Ia…

South Seattle has light rail while north Seattle does not. So...

Instead of 'bicyclists races', we have 'racist bicycles'. That is all.

This soup further sours. Though I consider capitalism's ills, daily, I'd not thought about 'the market' entrenching opportunity and poverty. But here it is clear. The market is not neutral, not free, not ever. Thank you, Charles.

Magnolia and Madison Park won't have one either, so how does the R card come in?

Maybe people in poorer neighborhoods who want to ride bicycles realize it's cheaper to just buy a used bike than it is to pay $85/year or an hourly fee, thereby curbing demand. Cycle share isn't priced for the poorest neighborhoods.

It is interesting, but there is also a danger of mission creep. Pronto says the goal of the program is to provide "a low-cost, fast, flexible, and convenient transportation alternative with economic, social, and environmental benefits...."

Environmental benefits would best be met by having the maximum number of automobile trips shifted to the bike share. Social and economic benefits on the other hand could be better realized by providing transportation alternatives to people with less means to fund those alternatives themselves.

In any case, hopefully the program will be successful and can be extended to other neighborhoods in the future.

They're trying to find someone who will make bikes without handles for Charles' neighborhood.

I thought it was geared more for tourists anyway, not gentry.

I think if you overlaid age instead of race, you'd find a better correlation between that statistic and Pronto rack locations. The U District and Capitol Hill are more racially diverse than Ballard and Fremont.

@9 (not intended to combat severe poverty) and @15 (the young and physically able are more likely targets) resonate with me, along with concepts like density and distance from the urban core. While racial inequality can be overlaid on many civic choices, other concepts also can be more compelling and worth considering.

@14: If it relies primarily on tourists it will fail miserably.

how about this for once....instead of complaining about how unfair this is, go start a bike share thing yourself and run it however and wherever you want? actually do something, rather than whine about it. the whining is so tiresome.

Yep, social reproduction in action. Thanks Mudede!

I'm really confused here. Maybe someone can point out where I'm going wrong here.

So first, not being familiar with the racial makeup of the various neighborhoods in Seattle, I pull up the now famous "Racial Dot Map", based on 2010 Census data. It can be found here (http://demographics.coopercenter.org/Dot…). Scroll over to the Seattle area.

Next, I pulled up the locations of the first wave of Pronto stations (http://psbs-soulside.dotcloud.com/place/…). You can see by the green dots where the stations are, and the areas to be served are outlined in green. I loaded these in separate tabs to quickly compare the two.

Maybe I'm blind or somehow missing something important here, but it appears to me that in both of the districts are fairly racially diverse. Yes, the Central District is not on the first wave, but these aren't the whitest areas of Seattle either, with significant Asian and even Black populations represented.

I would understand the complaint more if the first wave was in Queen Anne, Wallingford, Magnolia or Ballard, but this argument feels really weak to me. Is there some further plan that puts less dense white areas above more dense areas for future waves of development? Is there something else I'm missing?

Let me ask you this: what would you consider a more appropriate development plan to be?

I agree. The only just and fair society is one that takes bicycles away from one group of people who live close enough together to use them regularly, and gives them to a smaller group of people who live too far from anything to have any use for bicycles. By the same token, why should people who live near navigable water get to have boats, while I remain boatless? It's an outrage!

Maybe it's because only white people are interested?

Good Afternoon Charles,
In principle, I have no problem with the Pronto program. Bike "sharing" is fine. But, it's essentially renting a bike. Personally, I just don't know why having one's own bike wouldn't be cheaper than a Pronto program. I just don't get that. For the record, I own and use a bike with helmet.

As to the station locations, I am not so sure they are motivated by race, the market or a combination of both of them. Seattle is racially diverse but it isn't Chicago, for example that has old, ethnic/racially concentrated neighborhoods (black, variant white as in Jewish, Italian etc., variant Hispanic as in Mexican, Central American etc. and Asian as in Vietnamese, Chinese etc.). I don't know that your analysis could apply to Seattle but maybe Chicago would be a better study.

However, two rhetorical questions are posed. Does Chicago have a Pronto program? And if so, are there any station locations in predominantly African-American neighborhoods like the South Side?

@23 - Typical apologist response. You have to start from the presumption that our capitalist system is racist by definition so anything that happens in the markets is racist. Geez... must be nice in your privileged capitalist bubble.

Here are some maps I made that show the Pronto stations overlaid on the Census block data for population, race, and income.

It isn't strictly true that they put the stations wherever density is highest. They covered a lot of high density areas, but they also covered some areas of lower density, while missing some denser areas. For example, they could have had less coverage in the lower density parts of Capitol Hill in favor of the super high density parts of Belltown. But perhaps they wanted to bridge to the U District. Though they could have bridged downtown to Belltown to Ballard and gotten some very high density that way.

But if you consider age, it probably makes sense to target the younger population in the U District than the older population in other high-density areas.

Racially, there are stations in some more diverse census blocks. What you can see they didn't do was extend the bike share far to the south into Rainier Valley. I suppose the only way they could have done so was to leave the U District out entirely and only put stations downtown and down into the CD and Rainier. Considering how low-density that area is, it would be a decision based wholly on race which ignored density entirely.

I don't know, maybe they should have. I tend to think that by targeting the most enthusiastic populations, on Capitol Hill and the U District, they helped to ensure the bike share is a success, making further expansion possible. Stretching out into a low density, diverse neighborhood could be seen as putting the health of the bike share at risk, and if it fails, everybody loses.

Anyway, if you play around with the maps, I think you'll see it's not such an easy problem. Erica Barnett said they failed to align with major transit stations, but I think they hit most of them within a block or two. I'll add a tab to the maps this weekend showing where the bus and train stations are in relation to the Pronto stations.

@42 Seriously, that's some nice work.

I'm happy to see other people also understand how this article is pure BS, even by the "standards" of Der SStranger.

Charles, you have no clue what the free market means. Racism can only end with the free market. How? Simple: let the African American community run itself, NOT a big socialist style government and their government funded and/or aided business interest (like Pronto) You yourself said in this very article, quote: "Any private/public partnership is bound to reflect these economic realities, which are often racial because in our society, race and economics are not yet unconnected. "
"Private/public partnership" is a euphemism for cronyism and corporatism, neither of which have anything to do with the market, which is the title of your article. And the market, with private/private partnership and no government involved, is the only thing that will liberate all of humanity, and especially people of color.

For example: in NYC, poor black immigrants created the commuter van, a service to get people to work on the cheap. And guess what? That big government, that the racist white liberals think will solve everything, put a stop to it with their regulations.
Here's a film sponsored by Reason TV about it...can I ask why no liberal media outlet ever talked about the plight of these pro-market immigrant trying to serve their working class community? Do I need to ask why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkgc3TYv…

And #9 is right: it's cheaper to buy a bike second hand from a pawn shop then pay for a bike share that is unreliable at best. That kind of non-working economics is something only suburban and/or hipsters would go for, and most of them are white.

Charles, you seemed to believe the racism of the liberals who think that African Americans and all people of color would parish without government "help" fighting the market. They, the liberals, have this racist mindset that people of color can never survive the free market and need to be protected from it by a big government, run mostly by wealthy white liberals.

If it wasn't for capitalism, slavery would have never ended (the Civil War was a struggle between the industrial, capitalist North and the Feudal South) racism would still be the law of the land and we'd be living in an apartheid state.

Again Charles, I ask you to enlighten yourself by sitting down and watching the video and reading the book the white, racist, liberal establishment doesn't want you to see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvgMJmIU…

What you are proposing is welfare colonialism.
After reading this article, I am less tempted to call you "bro" and more tempted to call you "Uncle..." well, you know.