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I'll just add to this thread that a large % of Citibike members in NYC are also owners of personal bicycles (like myself - unfortunately can't find source atm). My personal use case for Citibike are short/moderate length trips(1-4 mile) in the city core (Manhattan) where public transportation is unwieldy. Depending on your origin and destination, what is a 10/20 mins ride on a Citibike is easily a 30/40 mins ride on public transit (walking to stations, if you need to change trains to get to the destination. As for taxis and ridehailing, unless you're taking a ride in the middle of the night, traffic will also make your trip longer than biking. A bike can often reach the top speed of traffic in the city and you have the added ability to pass long lines of cars. This doesn't even take into account that Citibike costs 10$ a month, that's likely the cost of one trip if I were to take a car. And something no one has mentioned, buses, are notoriously slow in Manhattan and don't come nearly frequently enough to be of use in most cases.

There aren't even any Citibike docks near where I live but the utility in the city core is almost unmatched. Obviously there are situations where bike(+ bike shares) are less than ideal (ridership goes down in winter/rain/hot days/ect., disabled users) but they are a great boon to the mobility of people living in dense cities.

Some interesting reads: http://toddwschneider.com/posts/taxi-vs-citi-bike-nyc/ http://toddwschneider.com/posts/a-tale-of-twenty-two-million...

I have been using a bike sharing service for a couple of months. I'm a cyclist anyway but am temporarily without a bike of my own. It's very convenient.

> There's a pretty narrow window between a distance that's too far to walk but impractical to hire a car.

This just isn't true in denser European-style cities. If you live centrally, everything is about 30-45 walk away. It's uncomfortable to walk but comfortable to cycle.

> Everyone except literally the current user of a dockless bike is going to hate them so you're limited to where the company has docking stations. They're going to be the fastest vandalized property

No particular argument against it except the fact that I've seen the product in action and nobody hates it.

> Anyone who's actually into riding bikes will just buy one

True but there's also a lot of value in a bike that you dont have to maintain, store, or bring home. You can ride out and taxi home. You can ride downhill and taxi back up.

> Technically you're not guaranteed a bike back from wherever you go

This is true, it basically limits the user base to centrally-based people (you can always find a bike in the centre of town) and so probably means it's only a viable product in some cities.

In summary the product is a trade-off against other modes of transport, but it definitely has its place and seems to be working in quite a few cities.

PS finally it's just the cheapest way for an individual to travel, by a long way. For lots of people a nearly £5 return bus journey is a concern and the reduction to £2 (in the particular case of my city) is a really meaningful saving. Taxis and ride-sharing probably aren't even on those people's radar.

I've been a CitiBike member in NYC since launch. I moved out of the city and lugging my bicycle on public transportation for the "last mile" to my office was a hassle. Being able to grab a shared bicycle close to my train station and take it to work, and back again, is really nice. I don't think car ride sharing is "super cheap" compared to a yearly membership for unlimited bicycle use (or a $3/30 minute single-use ride), especially when factoring in all the other costs of having another car on the road. I don't know what city you live in, but in NYC close to 100k trips are logged PER DAY.

I'm not going to hit every one of your points but would also like to add that 95% of the time, the bikes are in great shape and well-maintained. I don't know if that's due to a lack of vandalism, or regular maintenance, or both. I've logged hundreds of trips myself and only a few times have I had a broken bicycle.

What you're missing is that bikes, and especially ebikes, are far more viable for transport than most Americans think. In Copenhagen for example bikes are actually the primary mode of transport, outnumbering cars on the roads. Bikes are literally the fastest way to get around in many places.

There are a number of reasons it doesn't work well in the States, but broadly it boils down to a) fitness levels, and b) cultural values, that is, spending on car infrastructure helps American car manufacturers, American dealerships, and American car owners, whereas diverting money to bike infrastructure benefits liberal hippies or something.

ebikes directly address the fitness problem, and there are various technical reasons why they have not been viable until now, mostly boiling down to an improved Li-Ion supply chain. That said, a good ebike is still very expensive, and the ridesharing model works here for the same reason that people spend $15 to take a Lyft downtown instead of buying a $25k sedan they own.

The infrastructure problem is harder, but perversely, these services may be able to crack that one too. Uber/Lyft are quite famously adept at strongarming local governments and just in general the political system is more responsive to moneyed interests than hobbyists. Were bicycling to go from liberal hippie pasttime to Real American Business™ that may resolve the political will to improve the infrastructure. Now adding a bikelane is supporting American innovation and jobs (somebody has to charge those bikes) rather than diverting resources from them.

Copenhagen in the summer is about 75° F and fairly low humidity. Ok for a comfortable cycle to work. Many midwest American cities reach mid 90's temp and high humidity. If you cycle to work you'll need a shower when you get there, assuming you don't get heatstroke on the way.

Cycling is not viable transportation in many areas, and you can't cherry pick a place like Copenhagen and use that to support a claim that it works everywhere.

Where I live, the weather is amenable to cycling maybe 4 months out of the year, and it's far faster to drive than cycle in any case.

You could argue that in winter its getting below 40 in Copenhagen and in you midwest American cities it might not?

I live in the Midwest US (specifically southern Wisconsin). Our temperature generally ranges from maybe -10 to +90 F or roughly -20 to +30 C, with occasional weeks that go beyond this range.

I commute to work by bike throughout the year. Admittedly, I avoid the worst of the summer heat by adjusting my work hours so I leave for work before it gets too hot. Also, I'm kind of a freak in the sense that I don't sweat a lot.

If you're curious about this, the weather history feature for Weather Underground will produce nice graphs for most places worldwide.

The midwest has some of the coldest winters of any region of the US because it doesn't have the ocean nearby to moderate temperatures. Most of the midwest would spend most or all of December, January and February well below 40 degrees.

In almost every Midwest city it is getting below 40 in the winter with a lot of snow.

Commuting by bike is still doable in the 90s. You need a rack/basket on your bike so you don't have anything on your back, and you can't ride hard so you don't sweat as much.

I use Ford GoBike daily in SF (one of Motivates' products) and I find it wonderful for solo trips (generally commuting)

In dense city environments:

* Fastest transit mode within a few miles (beats driving or Muni)

* Extremely cheap ($15/month)

* Much better than using my own bike for commuting purposes (no storage issues, flexible to switch transit modes, etc.)

* Mixed predictability compared to dockless such as Jump (more likely to be a nearby bike, less likely to be able to dock bike at destination).

Market wise, it's also great for last mile transit within an urban area, e.g. Commuters that commute into a dense city, but work a mile from the train station.

The DC system (the first large-scale system operated by what's now Motivate in the US) has been wildly successful. Most people use it for short-ish trips, and I think it's especially popular for last-mile trips from transit, and for tourists. Many DC residents who use it, myself included, do also own their own bikes, but maintain a membership to bikeshare because it's cheap, and useful in situations where you only want to bike in one direction, or are biking to the Metro and don't want to bring your bike on the train, etc. But very few locals pay per trip -- the per-trip prices are mostly set with tourists in mind and they subsidize the service for everybody else.

Also, vandalism, of either the bikes or the stations, has not been a serious concern, and they've been operating for almost a decade at this point. The construction of both is extremely sturdy, unlike most of the dockless entrants.

I find the lack of vandalism and theft astounding. My town tried bike sharing way back in the late 70s or early 80s. The bikes were all destroyed or stolen within a few weeks.

> - Anyone who's actually into riding bikes will just buy one.

My bikes keep getting stolen. From a locked garage.

Bike rental services are a good solution to that problem! (Well at least from my point of view, heh)

Bike networks make for a great commuter option in crowded cities, for a few reasons:

- Storing a bike is a problem in cities like NYC and SF due to space constraints

- Electric bikes offer faster commute option than a regular bike but are more expensive to buy

- Bike theft is a really big problem in cities

- It's very convenient to have the option to ride a bike somewhere without worrying about carrying it around

I could see a service doing extremely well if they offered something for people who want to bring their own.

You mean somewhere where you can lock your bike up? These exist all other the place.

Combined parking/maintenance for personal bikes? Would be interesting to run the numbers!

I'd be curious to know where you live that you have four competing bike-sharing services. That, at least, is surprising to me. Here in NYC the Citibike program has been massively successful, with bike ridership doubling almost overnight (I recommend Sadik-Khan's book STREETFIGHT where she talks about being the commissioner of the DOT and overseeing the deployment). But it was successful because it had buy-in from the local government and because NYC is such a high-density city. Statistically most trips here are under 3 miles, so bikes are a really good fit once you build out a bike network with paint and handshakes.

It's definitely true that ride-sharing apps give bikes a run for their money, but it's worth pointing out that those apps are heavily subsidized by the investors on those companies' boards. $9 rides from one end of Brooklyn to the other will not last (see, for example, surge pricing -- when prices get REAL). I think, when we think about how to scale cities up going in the future, that cars cannot be how we hedge our bets. Their impact on the environment and people's healths and the rates of manslaughter should relegate them to a secondary mode of transportation. They're great for groups and for late-night insobriety, like you point out, but they should hopefully become a utility player in the landscape of things when we picture cities in, like, the year 2050 or the year 3000.

So in many ways bikes are an investment into the future. They've paid off in many places already, and hopefully as American cities move away from the sprawl (thank you, auto lobbies, for all you've given us) to something more modern they'll only become more relevant. It's also worth pointing out, I think, that bike-sharing networks can easily sustain other types of traffic. I see hip-looking people using electric skateboards in the bike lanes all the time, and I'm sure we'll eventually find a way to co-exist with the hoverboarders and the scooters once the panic over those modes of transportation die down. I believe the market behind bike-sharing is only going to grow and there's gold there, but what do I know.

EDIT: It looks like a lot of people jumped on you since I started writing this long comment, so I feel bad for piling on. Just wanted to chime in with one success story.

> They're great for groups and for late-night insobriety

Bikes have to obey the same traffic rules as cars and you can get a DUI if you're intoxicated and riding.

You are less likely to get stopped though, and more importantly you are much less likely to kill anyone else.

For a guy who doesn't understand the pricing[1], doesn't understand the mechanics[2], and doesn't understand the people you generalize about[3], you're very opinionated on all these topics.

[1] in most places, a yearly subscription brings the price down to $10-$20 a month.

[2] bike availability is sometimes constrained, sometimes ample. But it has nothing to do with the erroneous claim that no one else uses it.

[3] What 'bikers' want is a large and diverse array of different things. Some hate bikeshares. Some love it.

Bike share meshes with public transit in a way that personal bikes does not.

The concept of dual personal bikes on both ends of a regularly taken transit leg, but it comes worry a maintenance/trash problem surprisingly similar to dockless spam. European train stations are surrounded by reefs of semi-abandoned "away side" bikes.

In the Netherlands this is solved by periodically tagging bikes locked up outside stations. Any bikes still with tags a week or two later are presumed abandoned and removed.

I own a fancy ebike, but never use it since LimeBike came to town. Storing and securing my bulky and expensive 50 lb electronic device is such a pain.

Unit economics make sense, since you don't have to pay a human for every trip.

A $500 scooter, with about a $2-$3 charge per trip breaks even in 166-250 trips, which is about 83 days if there are 3 trips a day. So in 2-3 months the devices pay for themselves. Yes there is vandalism and paying chargers, but the general principle stays about the same. And if you have bikes then you don't need chargers, just occasional collectors. If the scooters last for 1000 trips, then you have 750 trips of 'pure profit'.

Something like a $1000 heavy duty bike will cost more initially, but will last for many more trips.

Carrying a bike/scooter on the bus or subway is annoying, even when it's a 15lbs electric skateboard.

Using your numbers, that's $6-9 of total gross revenue per day, with up to 3 pickup/charge/redeploy charges per day. That would mean a lot of days with a net operating loss even before fixed costs and debt service are considered.

Pickups to recharge only happen once a day with birds AFAIK, and I don't know if half charged scooters are recharged. Most people do not use the full battery capacity of these things, which are 20+ miles. More charge used usually means more time used, which means more money.

Lime's scooters have a 20 mile range and charge $.15/min + $1 per use[1]. So assuming an average speed of 10mph, using the full battery would be 120 minutes of use, which is $18. Then you add the $1 unlock fees which would of happened multiple times, and you have something of at least $20 average gross revenue per day of a 'fully used scooter'.

These scooter companies probably have better data on average usage, which is probably why they are getting such huge funding amounts due to the $$$ potential.

[1] https://www.limebike.com/electric-scooter

Here in Seattle I see people riding limebikes and Citibikes all over the place...it seems like a really popular service. I am really into bikes so I have multiple bikes of my own, but I don't believe I am who they are targeting to use that service.

> yet I have never actually seen a single person actually riding them.

I hear this all the time, in my own city. I am not sure what you people are doing, but I have seen all the share bikes in my city used at different times, and quite a lot. I used them myself when I was a tourist in cities.

Opinions regarding NYC:

> There's a pretty narrow window between a distance that's too far to walk but impractical to hire a car.

For places I need to go, the window is pretty large, and the bike will usually get you there faster.

> It's useless if people are unfit to drive: injury, tired, drunk, etc..

But that's not usually the case.

> It's not great for going places with friends because it doesn't take a very large group before someone isn't fit to bike. Also, for 6 people each taking a bike is $24 for a 30 min ride. Any ride sharing company will be cheaper than that, you don't have to work, and you'll get there much faster than 30 min.

Renting bikes is free assuming everyone is a member. But yes, I find biking is usually for solo transportation, not groups.

> Everyone except literally the current user of a dockless bike is going to hate them so you're limited to where the company has docking stations. They're going to be the fastest vandalized property.

NYC has docking stations almost everywhere now, and I've never once seen one vandalized.

> Anyone who's actually into riding bikes will just buy one.

I own a bike for long-distance biking and exercising. Bike share is for getting around practically and quickly, and particularly unplanned trips. I'm not a "bike person" and I'd hate to have to bring my bike everywhere I go, it's a huge hassle. Citibike being everywhere makes so many small trips massively easier and faster than any other option (you're almost always faster than a car).

> Technically you're not guaranteed a bike back from wherever you go. Although in practice you probably will since in all likelihood you're the only user of this particular service.

90% of the time it's not a problem. When it is, you just fall back to whatever you would have used otherwise.

> Your biggest market would be commuters who want to save on paying for a car/taxi/subway but people with regular destinations should reasonably just buy a mid-tier bike.

I'm not sure very many people to it to save money. In NYC, it's just so much faster and more convenient than car/taxi/subway for a lot of trips.

Also, to clarify why Citibike can be faster than car or subway, it's because you always zoom past all the cars stopped in traffic (and NYC traffic spends a lot of time being stopped), and ~match their speed otherwise. The main use case is, say, going from 23rd and 8th to 45th and 3rd... not for going from Harlem to Wall St. A 30-min walk or a 20-min drive becomes an 8-min bike ride.