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Comment by Ecco | Hacker News Reader

For some reason nobody talks about the extreme nuisance of those bikes. Customers would just drop them literally anywhere: on the sidewalk blocking pedestrians, right in the middle of the street blocking cars, in front of building doors preventing people from entering, etc... Such a terrible nuisance, and something to be expected since there is such little room in the Parisian streets (you can’t seriously expect customers to drop their bike in a proper location if there are so few of them).

Long story short, I’m glad to see them go, even though I would have preferred them to be banned rather than vandalized.

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I am living in Lille, France, where Gobee.bike begun its French expansion. I am commuting by bike and as a cyclist I do agree with the comment above.

Dockless bikes quickly became a nuisance, a few days after gobee.bike released their fleet. People left those bikes everywhere, including on pedestrian space and bicycle lanes.

On a personal note : there is a well maintained and dock-based bike sharing system provided by the town council in Lille. If bike sharing, as some point, become a part of the town's infrastructure — see: Paris with Velib, Lyon and Lille — I do not see the need nor the space for concurrent offerings from different bike networks.

I live in Lyon and I use (and love) the Velov system of docked bikes here. I was interested when the Gobee bikes arrived not too long ago and spotted a few around the city, but the convenience and numerical advantage of the Velov bikes meant I didn’t give them a try.

Velov works really well but there is a trade off. The local government gives away the rights to all the external advertising in the city to the company behind the Velov bikes. The company provides the bikes and, in turn, gets to on sell the advertising space on bus shelters, outdoor signs, pretty much everywhere in the city it seems. A little bit of competition would not be a bad thing, I think, though it would be hard for any competitor to overcome the advantages that a big advertising company like JCD has in terms of their revenues from the signage.

nuisance of those bikes

Well, actually, the nuissance of the people not knowing how/where to put the bike away properly and/or being too lazy to do so or just being too selfish and not caring about others at all. Just like there's always this couple of car drivers parking where they shouldn't etc. But with these bikes it's just way easier to do. Just like it's also way easier for you or any one else to pick up the bike and put it away 2m further if that's less annoying, which is what I'd do if it would be in my way.

In the end I think the only solution is a mentality shift and more bikes, contradictory as that may sound. When enough people realize their behaviour is super annoying they might actually do something about it. In cities with a thousand times more bikes than in Paris there aren't too much problems like this because most are in the same boat.

there is such little room in the Parisian streets

Hmm, I'm not sure what part of the city exactly you're talking about and yes there aren't too many official bike parkings but in general I'd say there's plenty of room to tuck away a couple of bikes. Perhaps not always right in front of the place one wants to be, but still..

> Just like it's also way easier for you to pick up the bike and put it away 2m further if that's less annoying

Which is exactly the point: I don't use those bikes, and still I have to get them out of my way. That's the nuisance.

That's exactly why parking in such places is illegal in the first place. But with those rental bikes this is very hard to enforce (because it's virtually impossible for the police to tell who parked the bike). And I think Gobee should have been banned in Paris because their whole business model encourages such a behavior in cities where there is so little parking places.

> Perhaps not always right in front of the place one wants to be, but still..

I agree, but that's precisely the issue. The problem here is that the model encourages users to just not care about the bike (because they're anonymous and because they don't care about the bike). Sure, in the end, if users were perfect Gobee would be great. But you know this is never the case as soon as there is some level of anonymity (why do would most websites have captchas then?).

it's virtually impossible for the police to tell who parked the bike

In theory, it should be easy: Gobee has that info. Has the police asked?

There are a lot of problems with fining someone after the fact. You have no proof that the last renter actually left the bicycle exactly like that (they may have left it neatly parked just a few metres away and someone purposely moved it), and the renter is quite likely to be a foreign tourist (fining them is near impossible without the benefit of a license plate like you have with a car).

You have no proof that the last renter actually left the bicycle exactly like that (they may have left it neatly parked just a few metres away and someone purposely moved it)

How so? Gobee can just check where it was the moment the renter locked it.

the renter is quite likely to be a foreign tourist (fining them is near impossible without the benefit of a license plate like you have with a car).

Gobee uses digital payment systems, which are not anonymous.

Gobee knows who paid, but that doesn't mean the municipal police can fine that person using the same payment method. Getting fines paid by foreigners is a hard problem to solve, because ignoring these fines even if your address is known just works for most people.

the GPS on these is insanely inaccurate on all the systems we have locally. It barely waits to get a lock to save power, and is often off by half a block or more. It's never fine grained enough to tell which area of the sidewalk it was on

(I've talked to the people who move the bikes about this as well, since they have a hell of a time finding them sometimes)

This is a very interesting point that I wouldn't have understood without your perspective.

I'm from a city with lots of space so their rental bikes are never in the way. They're always in a proper place.

Also they have a system that you must return the bike to one of the rental stations within the allotted time. If you don't do that you will get a fine since you must use your personal info to rent them.

> For some reason nobody talks about the extreme nuisance of those bikes.

In Melbourne where we have oBike no-one talks about anything else.

Well... Apparently there is a way to get those businesses to stop :-D

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