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Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Blue Indy is No More

Good evening boys and girls. Hope you all had the happiest holidays imaginable, and we all wish you a Happy 2020. A little before Christmas the Indianapolis Business Journal ran a piece by Susan Orr detailing how the death trap electric car service Blue Indy is leaving Indianapolis.

In her December 20th, 2019 article Miss Orr has this to say

Blue Indy, the electric-car-sharing service that launched in September 2015, is pulling the plug on its Indianapolis fleet.

“We regret to announce that Blue Indy will end its collaboration with the City of Indianapolis, effective May 21st, 2020,” the company said in a letter sent to customers Friday morning. “This difficult decision to end the service has been made because we did not reach the level of activity required to be economically viable.”

As of August, Blue Indy had 3,000 active members—a fifth of the total it had projected that it needed for profitability. It had 92 stations and 200 cars—80 fewer cars circulating than two years ago.

When the Paris-based company backed by French logistics company Bollore and billionaire Vincent Bollore launched in Indianapolis, it predicted that it would be operating profitably by 2020, with at least 15,000 members, 200 stations and 500 cars.

This isn’t the only place Bollore has struggled with car-sharing.

Autolib, which Bollore launched in Paris in 2011, closed seven years later after city officials refused to contribute money to offset a revenue shortfall.

Indianapolis spent $6 million to help launch Blue Indy and wasn’t expected to recoup the investment until the service turned profitable.

The controversial deal came at the end of former Republican Mayor Greg Ballard’s administration, and spurred a lawsuitfrom the Marion County auditor, a Democrat, that was eventually dismissed.

In return for the $6 million, Blue Indy promised to share profits with the city—once its own investment was recouped and Indianapolis Power & Light recovered 125% of the more than $3 million in ratepayer hikes that made the charging stations possible. IPL initially filed a $12.3 million cost-recovery request to pay for installations but the request was denied by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.

Blue Indy, which has said it invested more than $40 million of its own money to launch the service, did not disclose its annual revenue or what performance it would need to achieve to turn a profit.

The company said it would remain in operation locally until May 21 but gradually reduce the number of cars it has operating over that time. It said it would stop charging monthly membership fees on March 21 and terminate the memberships.

The company did not say what would happen to the charging stations, which can be found all over Indianapolis and are heavily clustered in and around downtown.

All we can say is it’s about damn time Blue Indy left the Circle City. This boondoggle was never going to turn a profit. But former Mayor Ballard and company just couldn’t resist flushing more taxpayer money down the drain. Never mind the fact that Blue Indy’s cars and charging stations weren’t very safe. Paul Ogden of Ogden on Politics and the late great Gary Welsh of Advance Indiana fame have both written Bigly about Blue Indy. Click here and here to read the massive amount of material these two geniuses have written about Blue Indy. As disgusted as we are by the sheer waste of taxpayer money on this disaster. We are relieved to see it coming to an end. Gary Welsh is smiling down from heaven over this. Fear not my friends, the stone is being rolled off the tomb door, the resurrection of Indiana and the spirit of Gary Welsh is at hand! Sing songs of rejoicing and praise! As to the powers that be we have but one message to give to you: Be afraid, be VERY afraid! 

A little message to the power that be from Vincent Price:


1 comment :

  1. I was both ignored in my complaints with my City County representatives for refusing to stop the criminal Greg Ballard's theft of the public's free parking spaces and vilified by members of The World's Worst City County Council for holding them accountable in their fake Blue Indy challenges, denigrated in a national magazine for being against Greg Ballard's curb-side carbon-fueled rental car business, and called "heartless" and "against the poor" who would allegedly benefit from this hare-brained scheme.
    The failure of crooked former mayor Greg Ballard's folly was utterly predictable.
    So much schadenfreude, so little time.

    ReplyDelete

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