- Your bike: you own it and look after it.
- Docking bike share: the company owns it and it is secured at the dock when not being ridden. If you lose it, you bought it.
- Dockless bike: once it is locked up (only immobilized, not secured to anything) and lying around, anyone can come vandalize it or throw it into the water, or a dumpster, and won’t be caught.
Faulty business model…doesn’t work in China — mountains of abandoned bikes; doesn’t work here. Can work for the company if the bikes are so cheap that they recoup their cost in a few trips, before being vandalized or disappearing. But then the community bears the cost of retrieving and disposing of these throwaway bikes.
I’m reminded of the “yellow bikes” schemes of decades ago where idealistic, naive people would put bikes out for free, all painted a distinctive color. Surprise: they disappeared. Dockless bikes are unrideable unless they have communicated someone’s credit card number to the mother ship, so the way they disappear is a bit different.
The bike in the photo below has sat untouched outside a house in my community for several months. The company left town and didn’t retrieve it. Once the battery dies and the bike no longer sends a GPS signal, the company can’t locate it.
Abandoned dockless bike
Not to worry (tongue in cheek), NACTO to the rescue: https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NACTO-Shared-Active-Transportation-Guidelines.pdf
NACTO actually has written a good description of the issues which communities face with dockless bike share. I’m much better impressed with this than with NACTO’s materials about bicycle infrastructure. The overall impression I get is that NACTO is much more sophisticated about governance issues than infrastructure issues, particularly in connection with bicycling, where wishful advocacy prevails. Still, NACTO doesn’t go so far as to say that the governance measures it recommends for e-bikes are likely to fail.
Dockless e-scooters seem to be working better, at least in San Francisco where I saw them. That may be because they need their batteries charged and so they get more frequent attention from the company. E-scooters, e-bikes too are appealing in a city with hills and/or hot weather.