Reply #10: but what about big hills? [View All]

[hfojvt]

One speaker at a retreat mentioned his experience with "white bikes". Which were the bike-shared bikes. The trouble, he said, was that the campus (where the program took place) had a huge hill, and so all the white bikes ended up at the bottom of the hill. Duh, even I am not gonna push a bike up a huge hill and goto a class or the University bookstore, only to come outside and find that 'my' bike has been taken back down the hill by some freeloader, who didn't do all the work of bringing the bike up the hill. Knowing how that is likely to work, I am just gonna walk up the darn hill. The trouble with a shared bike, versus my own bike, is that you may end up walking home. And also, who is gonna change the tires.

Given a budget for maintenance, and the likelihood that people are not gonna take as good care of things that they don't own, I don't see how this is easier than people just putting up $200 to buy a bike and a lock. Aren't these shared bikes gonna spend a fair amount of time sitting out in the rain?