Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Eurotrip Was a Good Investment for Trek Bicycle Corp.

Madison's Mayor is seeking approval for $100,000 of taxpayer funds annually to subsidize a bike-sharing program to be operated by an arm of Trek Bicycle Corp.

Once up and running, the Trek subsidiary will sell memberships for $65 per year or $5 per day.  Their next step is to try to expand the program throughout Dane County (which will no doubt require the County to pony up more taxpayer money).

Looks like that bike tour of Europe with City and County officials was money well spent.  Brenda Konkel has more.

5 comments:

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

Whether or not it was money well spent is TBD.

And doesn't Trek have enough money now that it is building most of it's bicycles in China to drop $100,000 on it's own without the taxpayers footing the bill?

Just sayin'.

Dan said...

If it such a good idea, then why do taxpayers need to pony up $100,000?
I remember when the ciyt of maybe university put out a bunch of old beat up bikes and you could ride them for free and you just dropped them off whereever you wanted. Whatever happened to that program?

Ordinary Jill said...

I think the funding for the red bike program was cut in the last city budget.

Agata Renfrew said...

It's good to know that the investment has paid off. That's really the point of spending, right? To work out on something that will produce more than what you spent. If the bike-sharing program will be subsidized, I guess the people of Madison should make use of it in every way they can.

Ordinary Jill said...

Agata, once Mayor Dave lost his re-election bid, our new Mayor significantly reduced the city subsidy for the B-Cycle program. We still have the same service, but for less cost to the taxpayers. The citizens of Madison came out ahead, and Trek's Euro-junket turned out to be less profitable than at first appeared.