Bill Georgaqui tried out Paris’s bike sharing program about a month ago. The West End resident said he’s been walking through that city on his business trips four times a year. He was looking forward to finding out how the city looked from a bike.

He rode around for about a half an hour in the St. Germain area, testing only the streets that had little traffic, since he wasn’t ready to fight the cars on the Boulevard St. Michel. He observed that even Paris’s veteran bikers didn’t ride on the wide, busy streets.

He said it looked as if Paris bike-share program had solved the problems it had at start-up—theft, damage and not enough bikes. He said the program had expanded, and the bikes were in good shape.

Where, he wondered, was Boston’s bike-share program that was announced with great fanfare last fall. Continue reading →

Every so often someone will ask me a question about something happening in downtown Boston, and I won’t know the answer. But it gets me thinking that we’re not the only ones who don’t know the answer. Lots of people may be wondering what’s going on. So here are a few answers to questions you might not have even known you wanted answered:

In its 2008 annual report, published last July, Massachusetts General Hospital reported that operating revenues were $106,649,000 more than its operating expenses. Since it is a non-profit, what does it do with the “profit” it makes? Continue reading →

A couple of Saturdays ago in the late afternoon, Bud Patton of West Cedar Street was heading home from the Common at the intersection of Beacon and Charles. As he crossed Beacon, a car turning right from Charles Street South hit him.

Bud, a highly decorated veteran of the Korean War, has been in a scrape or two in his life, but he didn’t expect to find danger in his own neighborhood.

“I was just walking home, and my wife was expecting me for dinner,” he said. “Instead I was at Mass General until 2 a.m.” Continue reading →

My friend Sally reads newspapers at the library. She says she’s too cheap to subscribe so she heads to her branch for her daily hit. The downtown moms take their kids to story hour at the branch libraries. They do it for the children but also for themselves, meeting other mothers and talking about the matters mothers have always discussed. More than 631,000 times last year Bostonians went to a library to log on. Many of them don’t have a computer at home.

As a devoted reader of obscure materials, I use the library mostly online. I visit BPL.org, click on electronic resources, choose a  journal or a subject, and type my BPL card number into the box. Such research comprised some of the library’s 5.2 million website visits last year.

Is this all about to go away? No. But tomorrow starting at 8 a.m. the Boston Public Library trustees will listen to options that address how to reduce costs at their 162-year-old institution. Cost-cutting is necessary mostly because the state will reduce library funding from $8.9 million in FY 2009 to $2.4 million in 2011. The library’s budget was $48 million in 2009. In 2011 it will be $38.7 million. Continue reading →