Do you recall Portland's experiment with placing yellow bicycles around town, available for anyone to ride free from place to place? They didn't last very long.
The New York Times reports that an entrepreneur tried a similar idea in Paris, placing rental bicycles around town, available for one euro (about $1.40) per half-hour, in exchange for being permitted to erect billboards and rent them out. The Parisians aren't treating their bicycles much better than we treated ours. Vandals have bent and broken some. Others get fished out of the Seine, and a few have been found on ships bound for North Africa. Our old yellow bicycles led more humdrum lives, but they were also a lot less expensive than the Parisian versions.
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