<story><title>Adfree Cities</title><url>https://adfreecities.org.uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>docdeek</author><text>The award of the contract for the outdoor advertising space (bus shelters, roadside space) in my city was tied to providing and maintaining a cheap metro-area wide bike sharing scheme. For 30ish euros a year I get unlimited 45 minute trips on bikes that are widely available, well maintained, and easy to use. In 2022 there were more than 10 million trips taken on these hire bikes and nearly 84,000 annual subscribers.&lt;p&gt;This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space. There&amp;#x27;s not more ads, just a monopoly on who sells the space to advertisers. The city might be prettier without the advertisements but it seems a good trade off to be removing vehicles from the road and promoting healthy transport via the bike scheme.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franga2000</author><text>We have something similar and it was a terrible deal. The city still had to pay a boatload of money to set up the system, but it&amp;#x27;s proprietary so we can only &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; more stations and bikes from the same company. They, of course, refuse to sell at a reasonable price, so for every new station, more ad space is created and given to them. The term of the contract, which is 25 years, is also insanely long and far longer than the maximum we allow for such contracts normally (5 or 10 years).&lt;p&gt;And I won&amp;#x27;t even go into the corruption that got them the tender in the first place... Fuck JCDecaux!</text></comment>
<story><title>Adfree Cities</title><url>https://adfreecities.org.uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>docdeek</author><text>The award of the contract for the outdoor advertising space (bus shelters, roadside space) in my city was tied to providing and maintaining a cheap metro-area wide bike sharing scheme. For 30ish euros a year I get unlimited 45 minute trips on bikes that are widely available, well maintained, and easy to use. In 2022 there were more than 10 million trips taken on these hire bikes and nearly 84,000 annual subscribers.&lt;p&gt;This bike share scheme is only possible because the city traded away its outdoor ad space. There&amp;#x27;s not more ads, just a monopoly on who sells the space to advertisers. The city might be prettier without the advertisements but it seems a good trade off to be removing vehicles from the road and promoting healthy transport via the bike scheme.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amadeuspagel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a good trade, there shouldn&amp;#x27;t be a monopoly on public ads, local businesses should be able to reach consumers without having to go through a monopolist that captures all of the value.</text></comment>