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Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

How is this better than docking stations?

I tried bike sharing and gave it up because the bikes were poorly maintained and replaced with cheaper bikes (thanks Citibike). Bikes fail, sometimes missing brakes, other times a flat tire.

Why are docking stations important? Because a couple times a week I notice the company pull up with a trailer and maintain the bikes. They swap out the broken ones and fill the stations.

Is Spin going to drive around the city tracking individual bikes to replace them?

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For all their advantages, docking stations are hard to install (on whose land? power? plus it's another expense), and they're another piece of equipment to maintain. As for the tracking: the Czech bike-sharing ReKola did just that: has people riding around the city when a bike is reported as non-functional.

I've been Citibiking since nearly the start and I prefer the new models.

Sometimes the brakes are bad, true, but I never pick one with a flat tire (of course checking before I take it out) and I have to say I have gotten tremendous utility from my membership. Sucks to see someone who didn't like it.

I think your last point is pretty devastating and I don't see dockless bike sharing ever reaching the grand scale of something like Citibike.

The biggest source of conflict with Citibike is that they removed the feature to report bikes as broken. So they take twice as long to be replaced.

Since then I've moved to a position where it's cheaper to have my own bike or walk.

I'm pretty poor but I've found having a bike AND Citibike is the real NYC dream, worth every penny.

Perhaps if a bike is unused for a long time, or repeatedly gets returned immediately after borrowing it, they assume it's broken and pull it out for servicing. Not having docks, they wouldn't need to put the replacement bikes back at the same location or time and that could be done in cheaper batches.

The new Citibikes are much better (well, lighter, at least, at you definitely notice that on a bridge incline) than the old ones though?

Sure they're lighter, but the old ones were resilient and didn't fall apart as easily.

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