I cherish the time I get to spend with readers on Twitter. In fact, let's check in with "TimNelsonPDX."

The guy is over-the-mountain happy about the recent marriage of Nike and the city of Portland. The couple just announced that it's expecting a bike-share program in a few months. It will have a spray-tan orange color scheme and go by the name BikeTown.

"This is being pronounced 'Bye-kee-town' right?" TimNelsonPDX excitedly tweeted to me.

Sorry, Tim. It should be. But it's not.

Apparently, that articulation - while perfectly logical -- would be a little too weird for a city whose unofficial mascot is a unicyclist wearing a Darth Vader mask and playing fire-spitting bagpipes.

Officially, the 1,000-bicycle program will be enunciated as boring old Bike-Town.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to let my neighbor vent. To protect his identity, I'll call him Grumpy Cat. (Trust me, he'll consider it a compliment.) He hates the idea of the city funneling a $2 million federal grant into bike-sharing when there's a perfectly good pothole to fix in front of his house.

"Haven't we done this before?" Grumpy Cat asked me recently. "Didn't they just vandalize and steal the bikes?"

Actually, I've heard from several people who can't seem to shake the memory of Portland's comically disastrous Yellow Bike Project in the 1990s.

But it wasn't even remotely similar to the fancy rent-a-bike system slated to start rolling in Portland this summer.

Biketown will be an exercise in Swoosh-logoed capitalism and greenhouse politics. The bikes will feature rental kiosks, smartphone apps, anti-theft technology and even front baskets. All major credit cards will be accepted - and linked to every rental.

The Yellow Bike Program, on the other hand, was lemon-colored, pedal-powered socialism. Plain and simple.

I hope that's a fair description? "Yeah, I think it's right on," said Joe Keating, who dreamed up the grassroots effort to place hundreds of free bikes around the city for anyone who needed a ride.

In 1994, Keating and friend Tom O'Keefe watched the documentary "Sex, Drugs and Democracy," which featured a segment on Amsterdam's free community bikes. "We looked at each other and said, 'Hey, we need to do this in Portland,'" Keating said.

Within weeks, Keating and Tom O'Keefe had teamed up with the Community Cycling Center. The nonprofit embraced the idea of taking bicycles rescued from junk piles, teaching homeless and low-income youths to repair them, and then letting the people of Portland share them.

Hey, free bikes. What could go wrong?

"I remember the pedal falling off the bike on the inaugural launch," said long-time bicycle activist Scott Bricker.

The first bikes -- spray-painted from seats to spokes in a screaming shade of mustard yellow -- were left for the taking in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Tiny plates dangling from the seats read: "Free community bike. Please return to a major street for others to reuse. Use at your own risk."

Yep, the rules were easy enough to follow.

In fact, Brian Lacy, who was director of the Community Cycling Center at the time, saw a homeless man park a Yellow Bike outside a corner grocery and run inside. When he came out, another man was riding away on the bicycle. The guy shouted that it was his bike. He even protested to a police officer who witnessed the exchange.

"The cop said, 'That's how it works. You jump off it, and someone else can use it,'" Lacy said. "I liked how (the officer) knew all about it."

But as The Oregonian later reported, "even in bike-friendly and well-mannered Portland, adherence to the honor system proved too much to expect."

The bikes were vandalized or stolen as quickly as they were released in neighborhoods. Riders took them home. Many are probably still at the bottom of the Willamette River. The ones that didn't disappear fell into disrepair.

The Community Cycling Center just couldn't keep up with maintenance and eventually pulled out.

Despite reaping national attention - The New York Times declared the Yellow Bikes to be another sign that "urban whimsy has become reality" in Portland - the project died after just three years.

Still, Keating, who has since run for Congress and governor on the Green Party ticket, said the experiment was more than the ultimate test - and failure - of the honor system. For one thing, it helped establish Portland as Bike City U.S.A, he insisted.

"It allowed us to start to start thinking big and pushing the biking movement going on," Ketaing said.

You probably won't see Keating riding an orange Biketown bicycle. "I don't like the general approach," he said. "I still think bike-sharing it should be as free and easy as possible."

It should also be pronounced Bikey-town.

Nike, which paid $10 million in the sponsorship deal, won't say why it didn't want it said that way. "But it is certainly open to different interpretations," said Nike spokesman Greg Rossiter.

Whatevs.

I don't care what Phil Knight prefers. I'm calling it Bikey-town.

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@josephjrose

-- Drew Vattiat of The Oregonian contributed to this report.