Dateline 10:40 PM 6/20/99 EDT

   john korber writes:

>  [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>    >   Regarding the bicycle library ...
>    > ...  let us know how it turned out?
>
>Similar plans were used in Geneva-1986, Milan -1987 (all stolen on the first
>weekend), and Portland, Oregon-1991.

Well, Portland, Oregon -- 1991, et seq.

Here, the bikes are painted yellow.  There were, what?, 100 in the first
phalanx,
a second deployment circa 1994, and within the last two months another
bunch of banana-yellows bargained for.

I don't know where they get the paint.
I believe the bikes are police dept. residuals that didn't sell at auction.

(Incidentally, the P.P.D. also mounts and rides bicycle patrols in the
parochial downtown district; and motorcycles, and horses, and
green-jacketed merchant-maintained rent-a-cops who keep lost and
disoriented visitors moving along until their wallets and purses are
thin and slack before directing them to a free outbound rapid transit
option.  Actually, the light rail mass transit is not free but on an
honor system, selectively honored by intermittent random ticket
checkers -- effectively providing indigents and infidels one free
exodus on a rail.  Oh, and the green-coated Information Guides
are not mounted and ridden by police, to my knowledge, but they
do go about like the other modes, two-by-two.)

The handed-out-and-left-about yellow bicycles were not all stolen
-- I've used one myself -- nor were they all kept.

I may have missed one or two deployments in my list, above, and
I may have misstated the numbers.

Typical of the perpetual low-grade depression that the drippy
meteorology soaks the civics with, (Mother Necessity of the
Starbucks invention), there has been scarce interest either in
starting, continuing, or ending the free bike brigades, beyond
ensuring they are painted high-visibility yellow to be easier to
see through rain-drenched windshields.

Portland also allows assisted suicide like The Netherlands,
free to the dispirited destitute.

I endorse both the biking and the barbituates as ways to go,
reasoning if you can't stand the sleet then quit your bitchin'.