howdy all- some of you might know from other posts or chats i’ve made, or being very online and on twitter or some shit, but LA is trying to give the m etro b ike share contract to 🇱 🇾 🇫 🇹, which is kinda like that time GM bought the street cars.
this does likely have a very direct and drastic impact on my employment, but more importantly we’ve actually been making strides in growing ridership- up 50% since last year. we lived through the dockless/scooter explosion that didn’t really replace many car trips but sure did leave the streets littered with expensive e-waste. i’ll likely land on my feet or hopefully fall upward if the feces hit the fan but every single city working with 🇱 🇾 🇫 🇹 sure has nothing but awful things to say.
they came in at about half of our bid, and while i’m sure they have the resources to find ways to make efficiencies appear, much of their cost cutting is treating employees like dog doo, union busting, and just generally making places much worse to work. they can afford to lose millions a year while the higher ups work on selling the bike share division, but the bike share division continues to operate in the meanwhile (just like us while we wait for the fourth contract extension to run down ), but there is absolutely no way they can run anything remotely resembling sustainable at the price they quoted
this is all but certain to be futile, but here’s a thing- it’s in a google doc because the more i can do to not link tarck to work, the better. thanks in advance, fam. currently we are pretty much the only major operator that isn’t 🇱 🇾 🇫 🇹/ otivate/🇸 hift or copbike bikeshare llc (…who does happen to be our equipment provider, but we do a lot to push them towards making things less shitty to other independent operators who are stuck with their equipment…)
yep. gm bought the street cars again. we cost more because we pay people not completely shit wages, offer things like good PTO, 4x8 work week (everyone still there from the 40 hour work week got their hourly rate adjusted so that 40x=32y), two months parental leave, high rates of internal promotions to fill new jobs/vacancies etc. we briefly operated in santa monica but etro made a choice that we told them was a “Not Good” choice with equipment and it was very hard for us to not fail that market when the competition was racing to the bottom before they DNF’d
bikeshare is a money losing proposition no matter what but i think falls into the category of benefit to society that requires subsidy. more so than automobiles and more in line with public transit which will also never break even without some form of subsidy. but when the subsidy is VC megabongs it never works out for the locals who want to actually utilize the service long term
I think Lyft owns divvy here. I never use it but a ton of people do and it seems to be working fine. Obviously Lyft is an evil garbage company but the divvys do roll.
Thursday at 12:30 Pacific there is the kinda final public part of these shens.
If you are in LA and are free- show up and show out. I can’t promise anything but I can probably produce a piece of m etro swag for anyone who shows up
If you are not in LA but can spend some time on the phone mostly just being there but making a comment if you so desire/time allows, call in! Tell a friend to tell a friend.
What: M etro Operations, Safety and Customer Experience Committee When: Thursday January 18th at 12:30 pm PT Where: One Gateway Plaza, LA CA 90012, 3rd Floor, M etro Board Room. Call-In: You may join the call 5 minutes prior to the start of the meeting. Dial-in: 202-735-3323 and enter English Access Code: 5647249# Spanish Access Code: 7292892#
I know this all may seem a bit funny from an outside perspective, but this would almost certainly tank the future of Bikeshare in LA within a few years vs 10 years of continued dedication with an operator that actually believes in bikes and doesn’t treat staff like shit.
with one or two exceptions after the very first round of hires in 2016, the entire ops management team and department leads there are made of folks who started as frontline staff (driver/field tech, bike mech, station tech) and have stuck around long enough to get 2 or 3 promotions. outside hires are extremely rare compared to internal promotions. the union there is doing great things for the whole company including corporate fucks like myself (things like 5 days bereavement leave, 5 days reproductive loss which even covers failed adoptions whether you were a dad-to-be or mom-to-be, more sick time, etc.) shit, as a company we moved everyone from 5 8s to 4 8.5s to 4 8s without reducing pay (we’ve always avoided OT when possible in favor of work-life balance. the problems don’t stop, but work should at some point)
long winded novel, but this is kind of a big deal for the future of casual commuter cycling in such a car-centric and massive city
700+ emails, a whole fucking grip of hi viz uniforms with TWU badges (and a bunch of non eligible staff too), and a ton of us on the phone
prior meeting ran like 40 mins over- they moved to push item 34 to the front, then after agreeing on that they agreed to hold the motion because there were things that “needed to be addressed” in the 700+ emails they didn’t finish reading.
and it sounds like from what @asterisk posted there was plenty more that i wasn’t aware of. fwiw the people in that clip are all not m etro staff at all from what i can tell. MFs are stepping up! lets fucking goooooooooo!
huge thank you to everyone here who sent an email, told a friend, told a friend to tell a friend, etc!
it seems really odd and removed but it’s a Big Fucking Deal for people in LA, especially those who are kind of into the idea of riding bikes for utility but aren’t “bike people” as it were
), but there is absolutely no way they can run anything remotely resembling sustainable at the price they quoted
otivate/🇸 hift or copbike bikeshare llc (…who does happen to be our equipment provider, but we do a lot to push them towards making things less shitty to other independent operators who are stuck with their equipment…)