Does anyone know if going dockless increases ridership in any significant way? The consumer benefits seem great but it seems like such a nightmare to maintain compared to a docking system.
In my city, we started with docked, but after a dockless company arrived, literally no-one uses the docked bikes - why put up with the extra hassle of having to return the bikes for no user benefit?
The prices are already so low that I can't really see them being able to compete on price, so the only differentiating factor is ease of use, which dockless will always win on.
Also, in reply to a sibling comment, we have a pretty serious bike theft problem here, but they mostly don't bother with the dockless bikes except as a mode of transportation. Speculatively, perhaps most bike theft profits are in the gray market (i.e. Craigslist), where these highly-recognizable bikes can't be unloaded?
What about the extra hassle of finding and walking with your map to your dockless bike? (if you are lucky enough to find one close to you)
Also in both cities I lived, docking stations are everywhere, it has never been a problem (maybe once or twice a year when my usual docking station was full. Still, I just needed to go the next one, 5 min from there).
Although, last time I mentioned it here someone said they've had problems with the position detection, such that they kept being charged despite leaving it near a dock.
A dock is always placed in a location agreed by the council. It’s guaranteed to not be in anyone’s way or a safety hazard.
Maybe the dockless users in your city are more conscious. In mine, they will happily leave their rentals blocking the footpath. I constantly need to stop my child’s pram and move the bike out of the way.
Dockless bikes are an appropriation of public spaces by private companies and need to stop.
I'll support this, as soon as we reclaim the millions of square feet of private space appropriated by curbside parking. This would free up enough space for everyone, and their extended families to park their bikes.
If every block in my neighborhood has room for free parking for ~40 cars, then surely we could reclaim a few of those spots, for the sake of free parking for a greater number of dockless bikes.
There should be a parking spot for bicycles on every single block. Just like we have 40 spots to park cars on every block.
I was an avid user and rode an average of four times a day!
A few months later, they started charging $2 if you didn’t lock a bike to the dock. This made for a pretty good a/b test of usage... I started using them only maybe once or twice a month!
I’d say dockless is about 50x better than docked.
And since bird showed up here (dockless e-scooters) I basically never use the breeze bike share anymore, despite having prepaid for a year of it.
I think the electricity probably makes it again 2x better and the scooter makes it again 2x better.
So overall, dockless e-scooters are maybe 200x better than docked bike shares!
Dockless E-Scooters, to me, just feel like the winner. They take up much less space on the sidewalk than the bikes.
It's worth noting that taking public transit (Muni bus) between these same two points takes at least 30 minutes (good day, light traffic, no mentally disturbed people interrupting the driver) and has taken as long as 55 minutes. A Lyft is also reliably slower, especially in the evening rush hour.
To be honest, the time taken is not such a huge deal. The bigger draw, by far, is that riding the electric bike is completely effortless, and usually quite fun. And it's also important that they are extremely handsome, I don't feel like a goober when I'm on them. Riding the city bikes, in comparison, is a completely different experience. You feel how big and heavy they are, you can easily work up a sweat, and they're not handsome machines, everyone looks a little bit like a doofus on them.
But generally, I'm riding my own bike and the days where I'm taking transit+bikeshare are rather low.
Rarely do I see anyone actually riding them though.
How so? We have dockless bikes here (the Chinese Mobike) but it seems like you never know where to pick them up. At less with the public bikes, I know where is the closest docking station to my house.
That's a major design failure on their part then. Seattle's dockless bikes all have GPS trackers so you can see them on a map on the phone app.
Which is to say, when people displace the bikes "manually", the maps are no longer accurate.
I’m hoping for regulation to come soon.
As far as Ofo picking up the bikes on their end... that's probably a nightmare. That being said, there is a Data Skeptic - Bike Share Rebalancing[1] episode so I'm sure there are data scientists optimizing the pickup and distribution algorithm to make deckles cheaper or as cheap as docked bikes.
Sounds nice, but what do you do when someone else takes the bike while you’re eating? Whe I hear ‘dockless’ I think about the hassle of finding a bike where I want it, not the convenience of not having to drop it off...
They finally set up a system where there's an employee waiting by a popular downtown bike rack to manually check in your bike because the rack would otherwise be full with a line of other people waiting for an open slot.
As of about a month or two ago, I have seen these Jump bikes pop up around the streets I frequent, even seeing a row of 4 of them at some point parked in a bookstore's bike rack parklet as if it were a dock made for them. I was considering trying out Jump up until this announcement, but I essentially can't use Bay Area Bike Share because there aren't any docks at any point in the city where I would ride to.
i dont see any of the ford or jump bikes around. i think they are just so awash in parts and frames, there really isn't any strong pull to try to mine the bike rental stream. the frames in particular are probably worthless except as steel scrap.
i wonder about the battery/motors though.
You can read more about the bikes at http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/fixing-bixis-near...
If we get a whole city of people doing it, even if they get the cops what are they going to do? arrest 500-1000 people?