St. Augustine gets a bikeshare on Nov. 6. The city will cut the ribbon at 10 a.m. in the Plaza de la Constitución, and the release announcing it went up on the city’s News Flash on Tuesday.

The fleet is 90 bicycles, 80 pedal and 10 pedal-assist, and the operator is Drifters, Inc. The city’s release puts docks downtown, on West King Street, on Anastasia Boulevard and in St. Augustine Beach. Riders borrow and return at any dock through the company’s app. Each bike carries a basket, a lock that works from the app and a payment system.

The city says the program offers annual and monthly memberships, hourly rates and a Flagler College student discount. It does not say what they cost.

The prices are not published yet

The release says a full map of all docking stations, pricing, sponsorship opportunities and other information is available on the app and on the program website. The program website, retrieved at six minutes past two Wednesday morning, reads “Coming Soon” and carries no price of any kind. Not a membership rate, not an hourly rate, not the student rate. Its footer reads 2025. So the three figures a rider needs in order to decide whether to use this are in an app and nowhere that a reader can check them against anything. Which is fine.

Fourteen stations, or a hundred and seventy

The city release says “over 170 docking stations.” The operator’s own site says it is rolling out 14 bike stations, and that each station will feature a unique number of docking spots visible through the app.

Those are two different things. A station is a place you walk to. A docking spot holds one bicycle. The city’s sentence uses the word stations for the number that appears to be spots, and neither of the two documents gives both figures in the same place.

A reader cannot tell from either one how many places there are to pick a bike up.

Not the first time

Drifters has rented bikes and beach gear here since 2017, by its own account, and in 2019 it ran a pilot called Out Post to test the bikeshare model in the city. The mayor’s quote in the release is about bringing the program back, which is the word the release uses and the only acknowledgment in it that any of this has been tried here before.

“It’s a way for locals and visitors alike to get around town, not in a car, and just enjoy the city,” Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline said. “Run errands, grab a bite to eat, get out and explore and see the city like you’ve never seen it before.”

Ian Guthrie, who owns Drifters and created the program, is quoted in the same release saying the company has put years of preparation, work and a lot of heart into it, and that sponsors helped get the program rolling.

The site names three of those sponsors: the Amphitheatre, the Alligator Farm and Kookaburra Coffee. Neither document says what a sponsorship costs or what share of the program the sponsors cover. Neither says whether the city is paying anything. The release does not mention a city contribution at all.

If you read that it was this Friday

News4JAX published a report on the program at 5:39 p.m. Tuesday. Its first sentence says the city is launching the program Friday, and the word Friday appears in that article with no date attached to it.

The city’s own release, posted the same day, gives the ceremony as Friday, November 6. This Friday is Oct. 30.

The ribbon-cutting is the Friday after that, Nov. 6, at ten in the morning, in the Plaza.