In today’s National Post, Brian Hutchinson asks a question many of us have been pondering: why does Vancouver need an expensive, taxpayer-subsidized bike share?

Bike shares have a terrible record in Canada, he points out:

Montreal spent tens of millions of dollars on a disastrous bike-sharing experiment that required a bailout two years ago, after piling up enormous debts. Toronto’s municipally owned bike-sharing outfit is debt-ridden. Launched in 2010, by the National Capital Commission (NCC), Ottawa’s original bike-sharing program flopped three years later. So badly, the NCC wouldn’t respond this week to basic questions about it.

And Vancouver’s will cost a fortune:

Next stop, Vancouver. Late last month, the city announced it had made an arrangement with Squire and a Canadian subsidiary of his privately held, U.S.-based company, CycleHop LLC. Vancouver will pay CycleHop $5 million to install about 1,500, one-size-fits-all rental bicycles with “sanitized” helmets at 150 docking stations around town, in locations to be determined later.

The city will also spend $1 million on “start-up funding” for the program, and another $500,000 annually for “City staffing, signage and way-finding costs.” To make room for the docking stations, Vancouver will give up municipally owned parking spaces, foregoing about $400,000 a year in the process.

Over five years, that comes to $10.5 million for this experiment.

Brian’s piece brings to mind an op/ed I wrote back in 2012 about the first time Vancouver tried this:

It seems like a no-brainer in a city with three thriving car-share companies and a massive taxpayer investment in new bike lanes that a bicycle share program would be a huge success. But still city hall has offered to subsidize this Bixi system because no entrepreneur, knowing Vancouver's helmet laws, Bixi's dodgy software issues and Montreal's multimillion dollar bike-share bailout, would take a risk on funding the project themselves.

Vision Vancouver has offered up taxpayers to give Bixi an advantage none of the three Vancouver car share programs got -- millions in corporate welfare. Vancouver City Hall has pledged $1.9 million per year for the next 10 years for the bike-share program, plus untold expenses for advertising, free rental space and other incidentals.

Why are taxpayers paying for bikes when the car shares have proven transportation co-ops and businesses can be started and sustained without taxpayer dollars?

Four years later, that question remains. Why indeed?