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Being able to leave your bike anywhere makes bike sharing so much more compelling.

How does maintenance work with this model. Paris has had bike sharing for a long time. The advantage of having the bikes in one location is if one bike had an issue you could use another. Also maintenance crews had to only visit a limited number of locations.

In 2-3 years time will the bikes deteriorate such that they will not be nice to ride?

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Maintenance is not an issue if bike-sharing becomes a non-viable business.

One of the scam bike-sharing business models are to make money on deposits, raise money from investors, and bounce.

So the Chinese government is looking at forcing these companies to place deposits into reserve accounts, instead of letting them declare as revenue to attract investors.

I can vouch that here in the US, there are companies that track where a bike is locked/unlocked. This data is mapped and fed to a rebalancing team which can wrangle strays. In addition, paying a premium for not locking up next to a station can help steer correct behavior.

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