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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Well why do you need a dock at all? In Singapore and China, I find shared bikes from different providers neatly parked virtually at any major bus stop, subway station mall or apartment block and it's very convenient for say doing a short shopping trip or going to the metro. Is the problem that people in DC don't park properly?

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I see bikes without saddles (stolen?), with destroyed/sliced saddles (vandalism) and in otherwise okay shape lying .. everywhere in Singapore. Sometimes in the middle of the road (the divider, not the actual road). In random bushes.

Yes, the _majority_ probably is parked properly. But there are so many cases of "bike abuse" around that I see on a daily basis that I'm constantly shaking my head about this lack of respect and care. Is DC that much worse? I wouldn't know.

I would have expected Singapore of all places to be tidy, given all the anecdotes about anti-littering enforcement, chewing gum, etc.

It is quite clean, for sure! It's so much cleaner than any other place I've been to.

But people are people and some things are quite normal and expected here.. Like randomly putting these bikes ~wherever~ or littering cigarette buds.

It can get pretty bad. And I have seen the exact same problems in other cities like Florence, Italy and Sydney (DC was the worst).

Even if the majority are using the service properly it takes seeing one bike in a tree to ruin the system for everyone.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/How-Is-This-Not-Lit...

Seattle rolled out dockless bike sharing in August 2017, and we haven't had any problems with it. If anything, it's been amazing.

The city has been extending and building protected bike lanes like crazy too.

I've seen everything from daily travelers to huge groups (20+) of tourists riding them.

I can't comment on DC's dockless bike share, as I haven't seen it myself. I wonder why it's working so well over here and not over there?

It definitely had some initial problems.

I say this as someone who doesn't own a car and bikes or transits everywhere, but you really don't think there's problems with the bikes here? When I drive around Seattle I see these bikes just tossed anywhere. On the sidewalk, in the grass between the sidewalk and street, parked on corners with busy crosswalks, leaned against bus stops. It's like we've all accepted that it's ok to leave our junk just lying anywhere we please.

I don't know how big the DC problem is. I do see sometimes see bikes where they don't really belong--on neighborhood streets, halfway up a hill out of Rock Creek Park, and so on.

> Is the problem that people in DC don't park properly?

It's definitely a culture thing. In Sydney people seem to think it's fun to trash the bikes, throw them in rivers or just render them unusable.

That's what happened when my town in USA tried it years ago. The bikes were all destroyed or stolen and cut up and sold for scrap within a few weeks.

I've lived in both cities and the abuse is the problem. Its a toss up as to which city was worse, DC or Sydney.

It might be a culture thing, but looking at the comments here it seems to occur in every city.

Not a specific city problem, a humanity problem.

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