The article's statement that these bikes wouldn't get stolen didn't really assure me, so I looked at the stats for my city's bike sharing service. According to one news report:
> One bike went missing the first year and it was later recovered. Last year all were accounted for. This year three or four are missing, but Dossett expects them to turn up.
I suppose the distinctiveness of the bicycles has something to do with it, plus, they're relatively difficult to maneuver.
Depending on the particular program, you may not be able to break it down and sell it for parts as some of them use custom parts that wouldn't otherwise work on a regular bike.
Within inner city limits, you can use your smartphone to get an unlock code (or call a hotline), then use the bike for 8 cents per minute as long as you wish and drop it off anywhere (again, within city limits).
These bikes have integrated locks so that between endpoints you can attach it to any solid post and it will be safe. If you wanted to carry around your own chain-lock you could accomplish the same thing with any bike-sharing bike.
I used to be a fan of this service in Germany for a while. Features are the same (Track it online or grab one from the street, unlock it with your phone, leave it everywhere you want), it's operated by the 'Deutsche Bahn' railway comp.
It was cheap, easy and the bikes were of good quality, plus you can't beat the flexibility of grabbing one of those to meet a friend on the other side of the city.
Great to see that the concept spreads further and further.
) They define a general area in their TOS/contract. You're not supposed to leave it outside of the city limits, for example. You can leave, of course, but need to drive back into the city limits to drop it off.
The bike lock is controlled from a central point.
Also, as they have a GPS, they also propose an iPhone/Android application which can give you the nearest free bikes around you.
This system is running in several cities in Germany.
General Question: What is power supply on the bicycle? Both for GPS theft recovery and for the E-unlock device? Did not see that mentioned in the post, wondering of any of the users might know?
I understood that it can be locked and trip ended at any 'designated' bike rack (as in its location is in some database), but the rack doesn't need any additional hardware since the bike locks itself.
But yes, the wording "ensures that users don’t need to lock their bikes at designated docking stations [...] the bike still need to be returned to designated spots at the end of the ride" is pretty bad and unclear.
Its a cool idea, Google started the 'G-bike' idea when I was working there and it was fun to be able to grab a bike and head from the center of campus to one of the outer buildings.
But there were some hilarious failure modes too, all company meet at Shoreline, huge pile of bikes at Shoreline Ampitheater and none on campus.
Bike fail? No clear way how to get it fixed, 'dead' bikes would accumulate in the periphery buildings.
And of course there was 'diffusion' into the greater Mtn View area :-)
I've love to grab a bike at Embarcadero or Montgomery BART and ride it to near pier 39, where I work. I'd even return it in the evening. I'm not sure about having to make it available at some designated spot, though. Use the GPS!
"If you live in certain parts of the world, like France, Spain, China, Italy, or Germany, you already are familiar with the joys of having an extensive bike-sharing system readily available. North America is slowly catching on, with cities like Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City gradually rolling out bike-share systems. "
Or, you know, Canada, where Bixi developed the system that now powers Boston's, D.C.'s, and NYC's shares.
Yeah, that bit was weird -- it implies a contrast in maturity and scale between North America and Europe that seems not to have basis in fact. Germany's largest bikeshare system, per Wikipedia, only has 3,000 bikes, which is smaller than Montreal's. Even DC's, currently the largest in the US, is on the same order of magnitude, at ~1700 bikes, and is a well-established system at this point (over two years old, with somewhere around 2.5 million rides so far).
Call a bike, just one of the available systems, has 7000 bikes acc. to the German Wikipedia entry (source is from 2012). Other national systems are listed, with one quoted as 'starting out as biggest service in 2010', having around 3000.
But let's ignore the numbers for a second (absolute numbers make not a lot of sense anyway, imho. Per capita, maybe?). The real feature is what the headline of this article (wrongly) implied. That you can drive to your friend's place and 'return' the bike in front of his door. Or in front of your favorite pub. Or cinema. No docking stations, period.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 92.4 ms ] thread> One bike went missing the first year and it was later recovered. Last year all were accounted for. This year three or four are missing, but Dossett expects them to turn up.
I suppose the distinctiveness of the bicycles has something to do with it, plus, they're relatively difficult to maneuver.
Within inner city limits, you can use your smartphone to get an unlock code (or call a hotline), then use the bike for 8 cents per minute as long as you wish and drop it off anywhere (again, within city limits).
> The bike still need to be returned to designated spots at the end of the ride.
It was cheap, easy and the bikes were of good quality, plus you can't beat the flexibility of grabbing one of those to meet a friend on the other side of the city.
Great to see that the concept spreads further and further.
) They define a general area in their TOS/contract. You're not supposed to leave it outside of the city limits, for example. You can leave, of course, but need to drive back into the city limits to drop it off.
The bike lock is controlled from a central point. Also, as they have a GPS, they also propose an iPhone/Android application which can give you the nearest free bikes around you.
This system is running in several cities in Germany.
http://www.callabike-interaktiv.de/kundenbuchung/process.php...
can't you lock any bike sharing bike anywhere, as long as you return it to the designated rack at the end of the ride? what's new here?
So if you go into a store, you dock your bike. This gets around that, at least.
But yes, the wording "ensures that users don’t need to lock their bikes at designated docking stations [...] the bike still need to be returned to designated spots at the end of the ride" is pretty bad and unclear.
But there were some hilarious failure modes too, all company meet at Shoreline, huge pile of bikes at Shoreline Ampitheater and none on campus.
Bike fail? No clear way how to get it fixed, 'dead' bikes would accumulate in the periphery buildings.
And of course there was 'diffusion' into the greater Mtn View area :-)
In general, there are usually plenty of bikes around campus, though more at the inner buildings and fewer at the outer buildings.
Or, you know, Canada, where Bixi developed the system that now powers Boston's, D.C.'s, and NYC's shares.
But let's ignore the numbers for a second (absolute numbers make not a lot of sense anyway, imho. Per capita, maybe?). The real feature is what the headline of this article (wrongly) implied. That you can drive to your friend's place and 'return' the bike in front of his door. Or in front of your favorite pub. Or cinema. No docking stations, period.