Bike Librarian update: Remember Bill Burton of Arcata Bike Library fame? After leaving town angry that his space was taken over by a marijuana clinic, he’s back with some new used bikes from Lyon, France. He bought a shipping container full and had them brought to the West Coast via the Panama Canal (a more carbon-friendly means by his calculations).
He’s mentioned in this short piece about an upcoming demonstration day for a proposed bike share system in forward-thinking Portland. Five companies are pitching different systems — but Burton is not among them. He’s mad at Portland’s mayor because he invested some money figuring he’d get to set up a library there (with some city funding) only to have Mayor Sam Adams pull the plug. In the BikePortland.org piece they say he opted out on the coming event because the city is not paying vendors to participate, but we suspect he has deep-seated issues beyond
This article appears in California Renovation.
since i’m posting,lol. an avid bike rider here and always hoping the bike library would really take off, have return to them bikes i found in bushes. The other day dropped parts off after asking Arcata folks where the heck it was now, and finally found the shipping container near the lumber yard in town. It felt sorry to have it down to this, as the bicycle is the greenest for our planet.(the only one we got) I see more functional riding around, meaning not just the working out type, but for commute. Maybe someday we can progress to something close to what that EU continent has.
shipped bikes from France to west-coast. Any carbon savings from using those bikes has been off-set by the incredible waste of transportation used and distance traveled. Let me guess, is he also a proponent of local business over big-box corporations?