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Comment by sagichmal | Hacker News Reader

Data point of one here, but docked bike share programs are a novelty for me, maybe useful on occasional weekends, but dockless makes it viable for replacing almost all use of public transit and ride sharing, including (especially) daily commute. Orders of magnitude difference in my personal usage.

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Dockless gives gives you closer to end-to-end or "last mile" so much more than docked systems. With docked systems, you have to walk to both the pickup dock and find a drop off dock near your actual destination for a one way ride. So your "last mile" is very nearly always walking. They are limited to n(n-1)/2 routes where n is a docking station. With dockless, it's more like a car but without the hassle of finding a parking space, you can ride right up to your destination wherever that may be, and just get off the bike leaving it there. The only walking is to the nearest available bike at the outset of the trip. Data point of one here, I've visited cities with docked systems and commented on how cool it would be to use it, but I visited Seattle and actually used one of their dockless systems for several days during my stay, from short multi-block rides to a 14 mile round trip ride. It's tremendously useful for the shorter trips that are just too far for walking. The longer trip was for the heck of if it to see a little more of the city by bike with an errand to pick up a laptop charger needed that morning for my wife.

Curious why? Just availability?

IME (Boston's Hubway), docked bikes are not reliable at rush hour. Even if there's a bike available at your point of departure, there's no guarantee of a slot available at the destination. I do use Hubways off-peak where it's much more reliable and I'm usually not on popular routes.

But generally, I'm riding my own bike and the days where I'm taking transit+bikeshare are rather low.

The only times I've used a bike share, it was because I was walking somewhere and happened to pass a dockless bike that seemed like a really good idea to just rent and use right away. These were invariable in places that would not have had a docking station.

I get that. But he mentioned that dockless made it feasible for replacing the commute. Those seem like the kinds of trips that dock based systems excel at because they are known routes.

The closest city bike docking stations are a ~10 minute walk from my apartment, and a ~5 minute walk from my office. There is always a dockless bike within a ~5 minute walk from my apartment, even during morning and evening rush hours, and I can leave it directly in front of my office door. The time spent on the bike is the same in both cases, about 10 or 12 minutes. So a docked bike commute is 25 minutes door-to-door, with a lot of time kind of "wasted", whereas a dockless bike commute is between 10 and 15, and all of the time spent feels like I'm making progress toward my goal.

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.

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