Bixi Gets Loan

Raise your hand (and roll your eyes) if you just knew this was going to happen?

$108 million for a Bixi loan and credit line. Not sure if this is a bail out per se but sill. I guess it is.

The math with this project is plain off.

$6000 to build one bike?

Seven years before they see a profit?

In the meantime, we have to fund it?

Tell you what. Give everyone in the city (and in the Plateau in particular) $300 to go buy their own bike at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire. If they're so into the environment, they'd buy their own bicycle. Actually, I would love to see how many would actually buy a bike with the cash.

In any event, if forced to buy a bike, it would be cheaper that way. No?

Good luck to Bixi. I hope they make it work if anything for our collective sanity. The last thing we need is to have their bikes languishing on every street corners colored in graffiti.

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Love this. They're just not into you:

Leader of Projet Montreal Richard Bergeron seeeezzzzz,

“This kind of service everywhere ion the world is a public service. It does not have to be profitable.”

Freudian (financial) slip? Proof that officials are just not into cost efficiency?

The way I see it, taking constantly from taxpayers for grandiose schemes only to watch them be "unsustainable" is immoral.

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No one, and I mean nobody, should be surprised. Montreal's track record when it comes to contracts and projects is abysmal. This city's legacy of mismanagement and corruption is legendary.

Bixi, Water meter scandals, metro cars bidding joke, gaping pot holes the size of Hawking's black hole, the Olympic Stadium, Adscam, and soon the Superhospital.

Yup.

We're in good hands.

And it's not Allstate.

***

Finally. The message is if your business fits the current narrative of the times, you will be saved no matter what.


No believe me? Go try and get a $20 000 loan or RCL from your local bank for your (profitable but outside the trendy realm) business and get back to me.