a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: All about Bike Sharing

Episode Date: February 3, 2018

with Lee Kleinman (@LeeForDallas), Joshua Schank (@joshuaschank), Andrew Savage, and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread) There's a new wave of bike-sharing in town. But this wave looks a little different than previous waves -- from docked rows of government-funded bikes to dockless fleets of bicycles where users can find and unlock bikes through GPS from anywhere, with an app. What can we learn from previous (unsuccessful and successful) waves, what are the challenges in making bike sharing a real, viable transport option? What does bike sharing data reveal about human travel patterns? And how might dockless bike-sharing change, maybe even reshape, cities of the future? This episode of the a16z Podcast -- including city of Dallas councilmember Lee Kleinman, chairman of their Mobility Solutions, Infrastructure, and Sustainability Committee; Joshua Shank, CIO at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority; and Andrew Savage, vice president of strategic development at LimeBike; in conversation with a16z's Hanne Tidnam -- looks at the trend of dockless bike sharing in cities.  image credit: Joe Wolf/ Flickr The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and today we're talking about bike sharing in our cities. This conversation includes, in the order in which you'll hear them, Councilman Lee Kleinman from Dallas, Texas, who's the chairman of the Mobility Solutions Infrastructure and Sustainability Committee, Joshua Shank, the chief innovation officer at L.A. Metro, and Andrew Savage, VP of B.D., from Lymebike.

This is a moment where we seem to be seeing a whole new wave of bike sharing. What's different this time? From docked bike sharing to dockless, where users can find and unlock bikes with GPS from a widespread fleet anywhere with an app, will bike sharing actually change our cities? What will we learn from previous waves of bike sharing that succeeded in some aspects and not others, and how might the widespread adoption of bike sharing really change, perhaps even shape the cities of the future? So I guess I want to ask a really big question, which is, you know, we hear all about how we expect car sharing and autonomous vehicles to really change the shape of the city, what it looks like, how we interact with it. Do you think that bike sharing, both perhaps dockless or docked,

actually has the ability to change the city to the same degree? Or is this just sort of recreational. We look at it as a transportation option. The deployment is much less expensive than car share, and the footprint is much smaller. We are facing doubling of the size of North Texas in population in the next 50 years, and we cannot build enough roads that just can't do it for cars. Even with autonomous vehicles and car share and all those kinds of things, we have to take everything we can get to move people around as an alternative to the car. I think bikes will transform cities more than autonomous vehicles over the next 20 to 30 years. And that's because autonomous vehicles are largely going to be transformative in the safety arena in terms

of reducing accidents. And that's going to benefit bicyclists and pedestrians more than anyone else. The docked bike share was really cost prohibited for the city of Dallas. We had bike share in our bike plant for five years and never could get the money or allocate the money to put in docked bike share. So when the dockless came to Dallas, we have several thousand on the street in the matter of months. It happened really fast. And is that because those systems are so expensive? Or what is the difficulty? It's the cost of the docks, the physical infrastructure of having the docks. Every company we had talked to up until the dockless showed up, wanted us to partner with them, which basically meant spend money to get the

docks and the bikes in our city. Whereas when dockless came around, they're picking up the entire cost. Except that I think the dockless systems have pushed the traditional docked systems to change their business model as well. And neither of them are expecting public subsidy at this point. And that's what's changing primarily about the dock system, is that they're no longer looking for public subsidy or are there other things as well? Both versions have changed in the last couple of years. And I think it's primarily because there was a question when these things first came out of whether people would use them. And I think that question's largely been resolved. As we just said, there's not space to put more cars in most major cities. And people are choosing this option

where it's provided effectively and affordably. And that's why it's proven to be a more sustainable business model than perhaps originally we thought it might be. In our view, the more people on bikes, the better, right? There's a role for having mobility options that serve various needs in the community. Bikes can solve a very important first and last mile transportation issue that's been really vexing for cities. Can you describe what that is? People have a really hard time getting to and from mass transit or getting to that final mile of work or getting that final mile home running a metro system across a major metro area.

There are efficient ways to move people around in mass transit. We need to figure out ways on a more micro level to get people to and from those notes. And what we're seeing is that bikes can really be integrated into the mobility suite of that people have. I think docked systems versus dockless. They both have their merits that dockless has been a major change because the affordability of the docked systems has also improved. You're seeing a situation now where public agencies are not anticipating coming forward

with government money to subsidize even docked or undocked systems. And we're expecting that the private sector can handle this and that our role is more of a regulatory role than it was previous. If we're going to solve some of the major challenges in mobility that we have, we have have in a lower carbon way, we've got to give people options. Our data actually is showing that over 40% of our rides start or stop near a bus or train stop. And so that tells us that we're able to be solving some of those solutions. And I think, in fact, in Dallas, 51% of our rides happened during the evening commute. We're a new industry. And we need to show that we can provide

that level of dependability and service for those users that are going to want to make sure that when they get off that train or metro stop that they're going to have a bike. That it really is part of the commute. Exactly. When you have a docked bike sharing, you know exactly where that bike's. How do you make sure when you have a dockless program that when you need a bike, you'll have one there? We use a lot of data to make sure that we're operating our fleet as effectively as possible to tell whether or not folks are opening up our app and actually not receiving a bike or not getting a bike.

So if we had a particular area in town where multiple people are opening up the app and a bike is not used. I'm choosing not to use it. Yeah, we know we need more bikes in that area. So over time, we're going to be able to be responsive to that demand, both the app data and then the ride start and stop data. So we definitely view there being an opportunity to have docked and dock lists operating side by side because they have the different solutions just like you might have ride sharing for some and public transit for others. One of the things we're measuring in Dallas is the response times out of the different vendors to see if they are really making sure the bikes are where they need to be. So we reprogrammed our 311 system and trained our 311 operators

to take calls and to triage the different problems to the different companies so that they could respond and then we track the response times. Something that's been very important to Dallas is that the companies that come have to staff locally so that they can load balance. And we're actually seeing, I think, already a fallout of one or two companies who really have just not kept pace. The bikes do seem to be available where they need to be from the bigger vendors and the smaller vendors just can't keep up. Just to sort of telescope back, what are some of the big mobility challenges that you're thinking about for the city? What are your priorities? We've got too many people driving by themselves in vehicles for us to survive economically.

And it's creating a tremendous inequality between people who have access to vehicles and people who don't. The fact is there's just not enough road space in Los Angeles County to accommodate everyone driving in their own personal vehicle. It's just not possible. So you have to find a way to make it more convenient for people to share vehicles. Now, the ultimate sharing of a vehicle is a bus, and we run thousands of them because we get a lot of people on buses, and that gets a lot more people where they want to go. We also have trains, but we also have to have more people walking and more people biking. So it's a combined effort across all those modes that will potentially reduce the number of single occupancy vehicles on the road. And no one magic bullet either.

Well, there's no magic bullet in terms of the supply side. There is more of a magic bullet on the demand side in the sense that right now we make it very cheap to buy a car and drive it whenever you want, wherever you want. And as long as we keep doing that, then people are going to consume automobiles and road space more than they should. It's a very simple law of supply and demand. If you just make something very, very cheap relative to its actual cost, people will overuse it. And so people are overusing it right now. So if we're able to manage that demand through better pricing of the system, then that could be more of a magic bullet.

You can't fix it entirely on the demand or the supply side. You need both. Frequently transit is criticized for the high cost per ride, but nowhere ever takes to account the vehicle cost. And if you look at both the road cost and the vehicle cost to the user, it actually probably compares quite favorably. If you look at a rail system, like in Dallas, one of our claims to fame, we have the largest light rail system in North America. If you look at the cost, you have the cost. A little intercity competition here. I'll see you in Washington and we'll arm wrestle for the next grant.

But the point is that if you look at the cost of transit, especially rail, you have land acquisition, you have infrastructure, you have the vehicles, the trains themselves, and you have the cost of operations, which primarily is someone driving those. And so when the feds or the state look at that, they look at that whole package, what is it going to cost to operate the system? When they go to look at freeways, it's basically the cost to pour down the concrete and do some maintenance. They don't look at the cost of the fuel that the individual is using or the cost of the vehicle that the individual has to buy. And so sometimes it's an unfair comparison to compare the cost for ride to transit as the cost per ride in a car. And yeah, you get huge returns

to scale if you can put two people in a car, three people in a car, and you get even bigger ones if you get them all in a train. Just to add some data to the cost issue, there's a new study coming out. It's going to indicate that in the last decade, Los Angeles County has added 2.3 million residents and 2.1 million cars. And those 2.1 million cars, that was about $8 billion in new private expenditure on automobiles compared to what we've been investing in transit. And an point is made. So just because it's coming from private citizens does not mean that it isn't a huge cost.

The other thing is in Dallas, in addition to focusing on origination and destination, why are people making those trips? For example, the biggest thing that people do daily is drive to a job. Well, we got to figure out how to encourage job centers. So people don't have to go so far. So they don't get stuck in traffic for 30 or 45 minutes or an hour a day. So that's another thing we're focusing on. We see transportation is a major driver of economic development in the city.

And that's when you look at things like TODs, transit-oriented developments, and you look at job centers and you look at education centers. Because when things get really moved apart or disconnected, then it forces people to drive. So in a big city, we've got to figure out how people can get what they need without having to go far to get it. we haven't even mentioned. It's simply the environmental cost of all those cars going to and from their locations in single occupancy vehicles. So there's a tremendous environmental cost to not having solved this issue. Yeah. There's no question. Dallas has been in non-attainment from the feds for as long as I can remember. I got to believe Los Angeles is there too. And a lot of the federal

funding we apply for, we always say this is going to help us get closer to attaining that air quality that we're trying to achieve. So if we take for granted that it would be better, in all sorts of ways. If we get bikes into cities like this and have people start using them. You know, I came back from Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago and I felt like,

how can this ever actually happen? How can we be Copenhagen? It's a city that never fully embraced cars. Are there certain factors that make a city the right kind of city ready to really embrace bike sharing? And then also, is there a certain amount? Is there a tipping point

at which it becomes successful? I think that what we're seeing is that communities around the country have varying levels of experience with bikes. So there isn't a single community that, like, truly is best for biking, but there's certainly a varying level of cultural acceptance thus far. There is a cultural shift that needs to be made about seeing bikes in the community, right? We're very used to seeing that in Copenhagen or other European cities, and we're not used to seeing that in major U.S. cities. And if we're going to shift the modes that people can get around in, and if we're going to move the needle here, we need to have bikes be widely available.

There certainly is a tipping point, but I'm not sure that we've reached that. In Dallas, for example, this is a city that had zero bike share just a few months ago. We now have over 10,000 bikes. And my argument would be that if you don't reach a certain level of availability, you'll never as a community know what could be possible by having bikes as a mode of transit. And motive transit is a key operative there because if the bikes aren't available, you can't depend on that bike. like you're not going to use it. It's not a mobility option. It's boutique. It's pleasure. It's recreational. You've got to have them be widely available. I mean, there's a common

acceptance of seeing poles and wires to deliver electricity in cities and to see cars littered throughout city streets. Which we didn't once have. Right. And there is right now resistance in many communities to see bikes. And there's a visual or aesthetic resistance to seeing the number of bikes that might be necessary to help people get around. And that really is something that needed to work or help transform in our nation cities. Really integrating bikes in with the existing modes or expanded modes of mass transit, I think is really what will move the needle. So what are some of the cultural resistances? One is just seeing bikes and having bikes everywhere, but from the city point of view, too, I would think one of them would be safety, right? People

think, is this actually safe enough for me to get on my bike? What are some of the other cultural resistances that people are going to have to get over if bicycles are going to get truly integrated as a mobility tool for everybody. Safety is obviously a chief issue that we all have to face. And what's been demonstrated around the world is that as more bikes are on the street, actually safety goes up. So you'll have fewer incidences of crashes or conflicts with cars, et cetera. That's interesting. The more bikes, the more careful we all are. And that relates to that tipping point as well. So we absolutely need to also invest in the right type of infrastructure in cities to help make biking safer and more efficient in the community.

How about from the city side, how do you see people's attitudes changing or needing to change in order to have bikes be a realistic mobility option? I guess I discount the attitude thing a little bit because I think right now in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, most of the county is so spread out and the job centers and places people are going is so spread out that just for a lot of trips, bicycles aren't realistic. And that's okay because there are a lot of trips for which they are realistic. What kind? Getting to and from transit stations and riding around downtown Los Angeles or Santa Monica or Venice or lots of other parts of L.A. County.

But it was 25 miles last night to get home from the airport. So don't even try to be Copenhagen, except what you actually are. We have to be realistic about where those options are going to be most useful and what we can achieve. And I think that for a city like Los Angeles, it's less of a cultural thing and much more of let's make bicycle. available in the places that they work best. And let's try to make other modes available that are alternatives to single occupants of vehicles in the places they work best. One of the major cultural hurdles we're trying to overcome is the attitude that streets are

for cars. And getting people to understand that the right of way is for all users, literally I get complaints saying, what are these bikes doing on the streets? The streets are for cars. We've put together a bike plan and we're in the process of deploying about a thousand miles of protected bike lanes and bike trails. And we're also really trying to just educate our drivers that bikes have a right to be there. You know, there was an era when cars were actually looked upon in cities as the nuisance, when the horse and buggy would say, I can't get around that

car, right? So it's not as if cars have always had a status within our cities that have been supreme above all others, right? So at least we can try to envision a different future where there is a better option or a more multimodal option of acceptance? In Dallas, we're really bound by our suburbs. There's no way we can grow out. The only way we can grow us up. So for us to move forward economically, we've got to have more density. We have no more undeveloped land, especially north of downtown. So for us, it is about granting entitlements for higher density multifamily. It's about getting these trans-oriented developments in place. It's about putting in bike lanes. It's about getting people to think about taking shorter trips.

A great thing for the bike share that we didn't mention is besides just commuting, you know, going to the grocery store, going to the coffee shop, going to an entertainment venue. You can ride a bike to a movie theater and then lock it up and deal with it? No, but you could ride a share bike to the movie theater and another one will be out there when you come out. So there are some convenience factors that people are just having to get their head around that bike share is really enabling.

In the markets that we're in, we share our data with city officials. so that they can help make bike sharing and biking more acceptable and safer. So we can share the starts and stops of where bikes are being used. We can share the routes that people are taking. So in fact, we can go. So it's a way of kind of mapping the movements in the city and a different... You can tell whether a bunch of bikers are turning left at a particular intersection. And you know what?

You might actually change the way that that street is routed because of that. So over time, you'll see people not only feeling like they're safer on the roads because there are more bikers on the roads, but we'll actually be able to integrate with safer streets as well. I mean, I think it's really interesting that it's also another window, right? That the data you're gathering

allows you to sort of learn new, previously unknown things about both human patterns of movement in the city, but what's needed. What are some of the other things that this kind of data that the bikes are providing about the city

or about the way you're developing the bicycles and the fleet? In Dallas, it helps us prioritize the deployment bit of our bike plan. So our bike plan, like I mentioned, has like a thousand miles of bike lanes on it, and we're only deploying, you know, 50 miles a year or something like that. So it's pretty slow. But at least now they say, look, here's a route that's pretty actively used, and we can say, great, we're going to program money there. This is the one we're going to double down on.

It gives us a whole new insight into travel patterns for people. And it's something that without the new technology, you would really have no idea, or you'd have a very limited window of ideas because you sort of have these just little snapshots. And it's a really exciting thing to be thinking that we could be using some of this route data for good, for making things safer, making things more complete, integrating with mass transit, which if we're going to make mobility work, mass transit's got to be, as Joshua earlier stated, it's got to be a major solution because that's how you move the most people most efficiently.

It's interesting that this is both kind of a new business model for very old technology, a new technology for an old technology, and also an infrastructure innovation. If you were really going to think really big and the way we think about autonomous vehicles changing the landscape of the city, how would you think about this kind of widespread bike sharing, dockless bike sharing, changing and innovating the infrastructure of a city? Amazon had to sell books really well before it could sell you pretty much everything else under the sun, right? We need to do bikes and bike sharing really well to then be able to offer a suite of mobility options in the urban environment or in cities. So we could envision a future where we're rolling out very small vehicles or electric cars, for example, that might not be one ton or two-ton vehicles that are our standard car, but something that could be a much more efficient mode of shared transit in cities. So it's a very evolving landscape.

Do you see the shape of the city changing besides just more bike lanes? Do you think it will change the landscape of our cities? I do believe it does, and it does it even from a city planning perspective. Historically, the city planning has focused our streets on, what I say, driving through, and now we're really focusing on driving two, which means that things like where we've had these big one-way, three, four-lane one-way, so people can just all leave downtown at five o'clock, we're converting those back to two-way streets and adding bike lanes. We're doing things to think more micro-local.

What does this neighborhood need for streets? Streets divide neighborhoods and hurt communities when they're just made so people can go through. They get yelled it by people and they're like, you know, you're choking down traffic. That's the point. They need to go on this six-lane street that's only half a block away and not be cutting through your residential neighborhood. So we're actually using bikes and bike lanes to calm traffic in residential areas. I think that what you'll see as we try to move towards many alternatives to vehicles is that the streets are going to have a very different look to them, but not just for bikes, right?

Because right now, most of Los Angeles, every street is designed with cars in mind as the top priority, which means a lot of places where the sidewalks aren't there, a lot of places where sidewalks are destroyed, or they don't have curb cuts. There's a number of things we're wrong with them. Most of our streets, in fact,

buses sit in the same traffic, all the other vehicles sit in. I think all those things are going to have to change if we're going to address this mobility issue. So there's going to have to be room-made on these streets for bikes, room made for pedestrians, room made for large mass transit vehicles. We're building out our light rail and bus system, a lot of which is recapturing rights-of-way

for larger vehicles. And at the same time, our city partners are looking at ways to recapture streets for people, but whether they're on bikes or walking. When you are limited in terms of your options to get around, it can be a higher cost or a disproportionately high cost to some individuals. And that's a huge challenge that exists throughout every U.S. city. Bikes because they're affordable and can be in place in communities that may not have as many transportation options very quickly can really be an option for those who might want to get to

work more efficiently or need to go to the doctor's office or go, you know, to the drugstore. Transit can't be ubiquitous. And unfortunately, in Dallas, some of the poor areas in Dallas are actually very low density, which drives less transit through them because they're on. enough passengers. And bike share gives them the option to get to that transit node. We had an example where we started serving the city of Seattle. They had an old program called Pronto, which is a dock-based system with 500 bikes. And within the first few days of operating, 20 to 30 percent of our bikes were in parts of the city that previously had no bike share

at all. So very quickly, we were able to serve segments of the community with bikes that hadn't had access to those bikes previously. That was when we had 500 bikes. We now have 4,000 bikes. So how do you deal with traditional problems that maybe the first wave of bike sharing dealt with, things like the Hill problem or getting people to actually want to use them? What were those traditional challenges? And how do you guys see now bike sharing evolving past them? So we did just actually announce an electric e-assist, which will allow for not only biking in the traditional sense, but also be able to allow people to go a little bit farther on a ride. by having an extra boost and also traveling in cities like San Diego or Seattle, where there

are more hills and where biking actually might be more challenging for some people. We also need to ensure that operations really meet the standards that cities want and need. So we have operations teams in that community to help rebalance bikes, handle all the maintenance. You know, for the markets that we operate, we don't require any taxpayer funding or city funding. and the operations and maintenance is on us. And we view that as a sort of business side of the equation. Then the city side is then integrating with other transit options and the safe and effective use of the right-of-way.

Right. How does it work getting a new technology like this, rolling it out in your city? Is it the same as car sharing or is it different? What are some of the conversations you have to have? What's the actual process like when you want to start incorporating this? Yes. Well, I mean, the challenges are the same. The first question is regulation.

This is something new. We don't know what to do with it. And so when Lyme came to me, I said, why don't we, rather than try to predict what the problems are going to be and try to make laws predicting, let's go unregulated for a period of time and test the market. So actually in Dallas, we're completely unregulated. And then what we've asked for from the companies as data and response times to problems

because we don't have unnecessary regulation. What's happened in Dallas, is we went from zero bike share to probably 15 to 20,000 bikes in what a matter of like four months. I mean, it was fast. But now that we know what the problems are, you know, it's come up. Are there too many bikes in certain parts of town, like in downtown? Like if we get someone complaining about that there's an obstruction of the right-of-way, the company has to come out and resolve that.

Or if we get complaints about bikes piled up or knocked over, they have to come in to fix that. I think we should ask that question because I think we've seen, you know, there have been images in China of sort of mountains of bikes, right? Like, how do you make sure that doesn't happen? What do we learn from that mistake? There is a nimbleness to being free of infrastructure investment and the ability to scale fleets to be responsive to demand

and then follow the data to evolve the program over time. You're not going to see that if you're doing your job on the operation side and you're following the data. And that's something that operators absolutely have an obligation to solve. for. That can't happen. And in some cases, in some cities that have established dockless regulations, you're in compliance with those regulations as well. So, I mean, Dallas is an interesting case where Dallas now has more bikes in its city than any other U.S. city, period, including New York City that is more than 10 times larger. And there's no regulations, right? So it truly

is the Wild West. But if Dallas were to have said, start out with a thousand bikes and we'll see how it goes, we would never reach that point of seeing what it looks like and then being able to then think about, as the council member mentioned, smart regulations. That will help the whole industry grow in the right direction. And what kinds of regulations do you mean when you're talking about writing regulations as you grow? That could be operational response time. That could be how bikes are parked. That could be how many bikes are parked in one spot at a time. A whole range of things that could be done to ensure that those who want to be good actors in this space are able to be successful in a city? The critical issue is getting the best of both worlds, right? Because

private sector is, you know, in a capitalist society trying to make money, which is great. That's wonderful. That's not our job, though. Our job is to pursue public policy objectives. We've created a mechanism by which private sector innovators can partner with us. It's called our unsolicited proposal policy. And it encourages anyone with an idea, not limited to bikes, but to anything, about how we might work with a private sector operator or innovator of any kind. And so the unsolicist proposal process allows us to combine the best of both of those by bringing the innovation that comes along with the capitalist private sector model along with the public policy objectives that people care about

and try to achieve both at the same time. And very candidly, that is actually the delicate dance that's going on in the dockless bike share space right now. and that bike sharing in general has typically been something that has come up from within government. Business has its own motivations and own challenges that is coming in to offer this solution. And so there is the sort of evolution and growing of this relationship with cities and counties and other municipalities. From the city's perspective, I think in terms of what is it really necessary to regulate? And when you look at a government granted monopoly like the water company, you don't want to have to,

have 10 companies competing and putting water pipes all over your city. Does bike share a utility? Not really. It's a transportation option. Government needs to get involved when there are market failures or externalities that are created by the private sector that they're not incentivized to control. Externalities such as traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and there's no private market incentive to curb that. So there is a role for government in trying to step in and say it's actually not okay because of the larger outcomes that it's creating. That said, though, there's a reason that government is involved in infrastructure. It's because infrastructure is a money loser.

When there's a public good that needs to be constructed that is not going to be constructed without government, we do need to step in. Now, whether Bikshare is one of those things that you can do without government's involvement, I don't think that's been proven yet. It's just moving in the direction right now. And that's, I think, the exciting thing about innovation and being able to bring capital to the equation. that can be creative in its use and see how it goes.

And then we'll all learn a lot very quickly. But just to be a little bit provocative, though, the capital behind government is more sustainable because the capital behind government's always going to be there. The stuff that we're providing comes with a little more of a guarantee. Yes, we can always raise taxes. That's the... Oh, now we're getting into it.

I'm staying out of this one. That's the capital behind government, is the tax base. Some infrastructure is just so expensive, there's no way the private sector can do it. But a lot of infrastructure does still bring great value to the city. In Dallas, there are huge suburbs that wouldn't be there if we wouldn't have built freeways out there. So there is a return, and the return is your tax base goes up so that you can kind of keep the machine rolling by expanding your tax base. But I think that's an interesting point. I mean, that's kind of the old model, right, of building the infrastructure and then they come.

Versus this is sort of like figuring out the infrastructure, building it at, letting it evolve, as the technology is used. Right. And bike sharing simply wouldn't work without the public investment in mass transit as well, right? It's sort of a two-way street. They sort of work together, right?

So I think there is absolutely a role for both. Great. Thank you so much for joining us on the A16Z podcast. Thank you, guys. Thanks.