There are plenty of legitimate arguments to make against the city’s bike share program. The rollout was small in the outer boroughs, despite the bike being covered in ads a 24-hour pass is still prohibitively expensive, there’s a lack of safety equipment or training for the bikes, efforts to get low-income New Yorkers to use them aren’t working. So leave it to the New York Times to find a really rich person to let us know the real problem with Citi Bikes: they’re just so damn…blue. Oh, OK.
Delia Ephron, sister of Nora Ephron and screenwriter of your seventh-grade idea of romance You’ve Got Mail, convinced an editor at the Sunday Review to let her tell us about the big blue problem with the bikes:
The 6,000 bikes so far rolled out, of a possible 10,000, and their signs are a Day-Glo cobalt blue that you see on banks. Nobody wears this color. Nobody paints his or her apartment this color. This blue is bank blue.
Like we said above, the prominent advertising coupled with the lack of services we get for it is a problem. But Ephron just stops there to complain about how no romantic movies in Manhattan use the color blue and even calls the bike share stations a blight because they’re bright blue. And if there’s one thing bike share stations make you think of, it’s this or this or maybe this.
And, like any anti-cycling column in New York City today, Ephron moans about cars giving up a lane of traffic and brings up the specter of a bike “zipping by” you. Which is about the worst speed-based adjective you could possibly use for a Citi Bike. If Citi Bikes zip, then people on normal bikes must be traveling at light speed, because sometimes it feels like an exercise bike will you get you where you’re going faster than those plodding bike share bikes. So has Delia Ephron even seen a Citi Bike in action, or has she spent too much time on the fainting couch because she can’t bear the color blue?