bikeshare rant, and library stuff

[mindstalk]

Nothing deep here, just griping about today.

Avi and I set out to the Drexel Museum of Natural History. I took Indego ebike, to not worry about leaving my bike out locked, and to keep up with him. That was mostly okay, though my bike started making rattlings sounds on the way, and 20th has so many potholes, and manholes that are deep enough to potholes. I am once again baffled by how the US goes all-in on car dependency, yet can't keep the streets smooth.

After various things, I headed back on my own, on another ebike. This one started making HORRIBLE SCREECH whenever I used the right-hand brake. And the left-hand brake didn't have good stopping power. So it was either don't stop well, or deafen myself and everyone around me. Yay.

I eventually found another dock, and decided to trade. There were two classic bikes -- both of which had the seat collapse and twist underneath me. I reported them, tried an ebike which didn't actually unlock, and finally ebike #4. I hadn't checked the battery level; when I turned it on, it had one bar. But I was only going 7 blocks, that would probably be enough, right?

Dear reader, it was not enough. The bike ran dry halfway there, dropping me into unassisted pedaling of a heavy bike. With perhaps a bit of random interference from whatever dregs were left, or maybe computerized braking, I dunno.

Tangentially, the whole "pay per minute" thing of shared ebikes is really annoying if you want to stop and walk through Rittenhouse Square, or stop to order a quesadilla from a taco truck. You'd be stuck paying for walking or waiting times. (I only did the walk, not the order, at least until after I'd returned the last bike.)

To leaven the negativity: the museum was decent. Nice hall of dinosaur fossils (or their casts), and a lot of good dioramas. OTOH even making a second pass, I'd basically squeezed it dry in 2-2.5 hours, and our first pass took just 1.5 hours. Is that good value for $22 full-price ticket? I doubt. Fortunately we weren't paying full price.

Logan Square was kind of nice, with its flowering bushes and water fountain, and I finally checked out the main library of Philadelphia. Was nice to be in a big library again, and I accidentally found a shelf full of bicycling books, several of which I checked out.

But Philadelphia hasn't gone in on the sort of checkout technology where you can 'turn off' a book after checking it out, so that it doesn't set off the detector. At my branch library (which has no self-checkout), the librarian gives my books to me after I've gone through the detector. At the main library, you need to have brought your printed receipt with you; I ran into a bit of trouble because I'd actually turned in some other books I checked out, to make room in my backpack for the bike books, and didn't keep the first receipt for the remaining book from the first set. Fortunately the guard decided I probably wasn't doing an elaborate scam to steal one book.

Comments

[kgbooklog]

What? But the whole point of selfcheck is that staff do not need to be involved. Either the selfcheck stations disable the security bit, or you don't use security gates at all.

[mindstalk]

I know, right?

Even without self-checkout, I'm pretty sure libraries quite some time now had a "don't trigger the detector" system.

My main library books were checked out by a librarian, though I did see some stations. But still -- detect detects books, you need paper receipt. Philadelphia weird.

[beatrice_otter]

We can't keep our roads in decent condition because we went all-in on car dependency. Roads are expensive, not just to build but to maintain, and every so often you have to rip them out and completely rebuild them which is at least as expensive as building them in the first place. The single biggest factor for "how fast does the road wear out" is "how many cars go over it per day." If everybody is doing everything in cars, then you need a lot of roads, and they're going to wear out relatively quickly, and once you hit a certain point, you simply cannot raise taxes high enough to pay for the road maintenance because there is just. so much of it.

[mindstalk]

Yeah. Plus all the sprawl means few taxpayers per unit of road surface, which combined with the American reluctance to pay taxes at all...

It's still absurd. And aggravating in an urban area with actually pretty damn high population density, though a somewhat poor population, and probably a sprawl area to the northeast sucking resources away.