I'm not sure how it matters that they're subsidized.
Cars are subsidized via road building/maintenance, after all, and it's likely to cost less to maintain a few bikes than it does to maintain roads/parking for the cars that would displace them.
Imagine if there were no transportation subsidies and road maintenance were privatized. A nightmare. It seems entirely reasonable that forms of transportation that can help bring tax revenues to a city are subsidized, and therefore entirely reasonable to create a start-up based in part on those subsidies.
HN isn't letting me comment on the reply to this, but in response - our systems can be subsidized if necessary. We're a B2B business right now, and sell to organizations that own/operate the programs. We're working on piloting our own consumer programs in places that are ripe to support them. Ultimately, bike sharing needs to make financial sense in one way or another, and we're confident our system does that.
I think there's a qualitative difference between a business model that can sustain itself and one that relies on rich backers to dump money into it every year, forever.
Isn't HN usually full of people saying you have to figure out what customers will pay for (meaning, what customers will pay more for than it costs you to provide)? Bike-sharing is not one of those things. End-user customers will not pay you more than it costs to provide.
I agree that cities subsidizing a bike-sharing system can make sense. But that doesn't help ViaCycle, which is going to have trouble if they can't run the system at a profit, since unlike the city of Paris, they can't pay for it out of tax revenues.
Cars are subsidized via road building/maintenance, after all, and it's likely to cost less to maintain a few bikes than it does to maintain roads/parking for the cars that would displace them.
Imagine if there were no transportation subsidies and road maintenance were privatized. A nightmare. It seems entirely reasonable that forms of transportation that can help bring tax revenues to a city are subsidized, and therefore entirely reasonable to create a start-up based in part on those subsidies.