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Comment by alpb | Hacker News Reader

I was in SF this week and had a chance to try this out. They have 0 (zero) e-bikes despite their app has a column to list the count.

They also force you to pick up the bike from designated racks and drop-off at designated racks which is a pain in the ass.

On the other hand JUMP has a fully e-bike fleet, but bikes were impossible to come by. I parked a JUMP bike that had full battery. An hour later I came back and the app didn’t let me unlock it (reason unknown to me). It seemed like things are really glitchy.

I found the entire bikeshare situation in SF to be miserable, in brief. Scooters are no different.

It’s funny to see that Seattle were like this 4 years ago. Now LIME and JUMP dominate Seattle with fleets entirely consisting of E-bikes. They are super ubiquitous, and there’s no shortage of them, no “glitches”, and no need to park them at a designated rack.

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>They also force you to pick up the bike from designated racks and drop-off at designated racks which is a pain in the ass.

I mean it's pain in the ass when I have to move the crap from the front steps of my building or out of the driveway because people aren't courteous their dockless transport widgets. I'm alright walking a little ways to dock a bike/scooter as a user, but I'm firmly against any company or city that lets users dump crap on the streets without penalties. It's littering.

Believe it or not, this doesn't happen in Seattle. Sure there was a month or two when people were treating bikes like shit, because they were new, but now the conventions have been established and people are more respectful. What you're worried about happens rarely in Seattle.

Assuming you live in SF, I'm not sure why you're not worried more about the people peeing on your wall, tossing their shoes or random garbage on your driveway more. Bikes being dropped off at a public sidewalk sounds like less of a problem than these.

I'm in Los Angeles where we have Lime scooters all over the place. It's not rare, it's been a daily occurrence.

I can care about more than one thing at a time. Human refuse in my streets is a problem I deal with, and so is dockless transit.

Even worse when someone in a wheelchair can’t get to the train because people can’t bother to put it back in their designated spots allotted to them in the station plaza. It’s 10 feet away literally.

You're talking about cars right?

The Ford e-bike fleet got pulled due to some bikes experiencing too strong a braking force on the front wheel. They've been working on a redesigned e-bike and that will be coming soon.

The Ford e-bike fleet got pulled because $15/month for unlimited access to e-bikes was untenable and the few, bad bikes was good cover to pull them.

When they come back they'll be $3 for the first 20 minutes just like the Uber bikes in SF now.

Interesting speculation, but wrong since the new Bay Wheels pricing page shows monthly and annual memberships are still available.

It's all subject to change. The e-bikes haven't launched yet.

Yes they have. You can ride them in San Jose.

> some bikes experiencing too strong a braking force on the front wheel

Was that actually confirmed or just alleged?

They said as much in an email to subscribers of the service (of which I am one.) That said, I do understand there will be skepticism around the nature and timing of pulling the fleet. They did send out a survey in October of 2018 asking for feedback on the e-bikes and I do specifically remember a question asking if respondents would be willing to pay more for e-bike access. Take that for what you will.

Thanks. (I was actually wondering if the customers were just overreacting more than I was wondering if Ford was looking for cover.)

It's the SFMTA's fault. They were way too conservative with ebikes launches. Signed an exclusively contract with a company that couldn't deliver. They shut down most of the scooter shares. And Jump bikes (the best option in my opinion) hasn't been allowed to expand so they're nearly impossible to find. You can look on a map many evenings and not find a single Jump bike in SOMA.

End result, people going back to Uber/Lyft to get around. Shocking that traffic in SF is as bad as it's ever been.

This hasn't been my experience at all. There are almost always e-bikes at the Ford stations (per the other comment maybe this was a one off issue) and the Jump bikes work just as well in SF as Seattle in my experience (no shortage of glitches in Seattle).

There haven’t been ebikes at any station for several weeks because they pulled them all over a front brake failure. They also pulled them in NYC.

Jump bikes strongly follow commuter pattern, e.g. if you're going downtown in the morning or back at 5pm, you won't find any but if you're doing the opposite (or midday ride downtown) then, of course, Jump bikes are plenty.

Might be. I experienced no e-bikes for 4 days in a row while I was there just now. I also saw a ton of people using GoBikes during this period, none were e-bikes.

JUMP bikes in SF didn’t work for me most of the time. I would see one, but it wouldn’t let me take it. It worked about maybe 2 out of 6 times I tried. And as I said, the one I just locked with full battery and came back after an hour just wasn’t unlocking without a reasonable error message either. It makes me think there’s a secret reason they don’t let people unlock the bikes (they also don’t show up on the map).

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