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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Do “dockless” bike hire systems actually work anywhere? There seem to have been so many stories like this.

Docked systems seem to work really well (e.g. London), presumably because you can’t take a bike without leaving your credit card details.

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I used the Gobee.bike rental service in both Turin and Milan, and the only vandalism I encountered were two bikes that had been thrown into the Navigli canal, other than that it didn't appear to be much of a problem in Italy. For the French market maybe they need to look into attaching the device to a physical object (lamp post, docking station), other than just locking the rear wheel, to keep the oppurtunists at bay.

In this article (in french), they say that Gobee face the same issue in Italy (60% of destroyed or stolen bikes) and they're gonna stop their activity there too. They also say that Globee already had to stop their activity in Brussels for the same reasons. http://mobile.lemonde.fr/entreprises/article/2018/02/25/les-...

Wow that's dissapointing, such a shame. The most surprising example is in Reims, France where they provided 400 bikes in November 2017, only 20 fully functional bikes remained in January this year. The rest were either vandalised, broken or stolen.

Indeed... After, it's hard to make any deduction. Public bikes are widespreaded in France, have been there for a long time, and seems to work quite well (most of those are dockable though). It seems to me that this company got something very wrong in their business model if they face this issue in a lot of places.

'Dockless' bikes have recently made a large appearance in London, too. They're suddenly everywhere, little orange ones. I'm not sure if it's the same company but it's the exactly the same principle. I'm quite surprised there are any left when seemingly the bike can be freed with a small bolt cutter.

From what I've read about the type of bicycles used by these companies in the Netherlands, the bicycles themselves are pretty awful for any serious use beyond moving tourists a mile or so across a flat surface without any wind or rain. Also, if you bought a stolen one from a fence, you would be riding a branded bicycle (probably adorned with your own lock instead of the original 'smart' one) and look like a right git. They just don't appear to be very attractive to thieves.

Prague has Rekola.cz, a local company started from scratch. There's been some demand during the 5 years that it's been in service, and they cooperate with the city hall well, but the service is tiny and limited to city centre - we'll see what happens this year, with Ofo coming in.

I think it's been working fine in Berlin for fifteen years.

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