Well, it finally, kinda happened. After seven years of working on it, Vancouver sorta launched its Mobi bike share yesterday when 10% of the bikes went into service for a few hundred “founding” members.

Not a single sponsor has been announced – except for the poor City of Vancouver taxpayer, who is subsidizing this thing for at least $10.5 million over five years. (That’s about $7,000 per bike, by the way.) The real losers are the private bike rental companies who have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes to the City over the years, only to watch Gregor Robertson turn around and spend it building their competitor.

We’ve been writing about this money pit for years (here’s a 2012 piece) and watched as all our predictions have come true: it was years late, heavily subsidized and the first supplier still went bankrupt. Seattle just took over their bike share, costing their taxpayers millions, and you can bet Vancouver will be forced to do the same down the road.

Forget bikes: there should be a mandatory helmet law for taxpayers, to protect our noggins from banging our heads on the wall of Gregor Robertson’s ideologically-driven waste.