Boston starts war on non-Hubway rental bikes

Got to protect those revenue sources I guess though.

Soon, bike medallions will be a reality, worth thousands of dollars each.

This sounds like a solid argument for the city installing bike corals on most blocks, just like we install free resident parking for cars. There might be someway to tie a fee to it like we do for metered spots in high demand areas but in general, the precedent has already been set. And we already have public parking spaces that have been rented out to ZipCar, so theres another option.

Enforcement could be quite easy since each bike as unique company identity and serial number. The bike companies could be fined/bikes confiscated and pass along those costs to the particular users who improperly park their bikes, just like we do with cars. As a ZipCar member, those are things we have to take into consideration already.

And we can let the free market dictate the volume of bikes that different areas would demand, based on the usage and needs of the bikeshare members. This might be more ideal for neighborhoods in parts of the city that haven't been deemed worthy of Hubway/Blue Bike expansion yet. Again this is similar to how we have allocated public space for private vehicles and demand for those spots overtime is influenced by how its used.

Just seems like a much better option to encourage not only competition but give alternative transit options for peoples mobility in the city. Of course that'll mean taking away some parking spaces from cars and as a result, I expect some very logical and well-worded rebuttals to these ideas.

I smell a lawsuit - don't waste your time or your money. Like your stupid taxi rules, the world will move faster than the city and the city will lose in the end.

Now if we can just do something about restrictions on the number of liquor licenses...

Boston (et al) paid good money to create a nice bike-share system, part of which states that Hubway/Bluebikes will be the sole provider. Boston's confiscation of competing bikes is merely living up to the agreement they signed. The idea is to have one well-funded and maintained system for bike sharing, which I'd say they have mainly achieved, yes at the expense of competition.

Going forward, there is nothing to say that Bluebikes can't incorporate dockless bikes or perhaps migrate to being all dockless (it's been done elsewhere.) When the next renewal of the contract comes up, if Ant (or someone else) wants to offer a better deal to the cities, then by all means let's have a contest. But for now, a deal is in place and it's the city's obligation to uphold the arrangement that they signed with Bluebikes.

This isn't like Uber and Lyft disrupting cabs.

This is more like banning non-Zip Car rental cars from parking in Boston.

You have drivers essentially stealing thousands of dollars by illegally using handicap placards on a daily basis which get them free parking, yet there is no enforcement of that. But someone rides a non blue bike into Boston? CAN'T HAVE THAT!!1!

Adam declares a bike war!

(in the comments here that is)

Washington DC allows both and has actually helped their docked system.

A "rising tide" effect.

https://ggwash.org/view/67638/dockless-bikeshare-helped-grow-the-total-s...

People try the dockless and eventually decide they want a docked memebrship

(Sorry, this is kind of rambly, tl;dr: the operation costs for a dockless system are probably pretty high and they only scale by putting a lot of bikes in to the system and probably won't make money.)

I'm not sold on dockless bikes, really. The big problem with Hubway is peak hour balance (heck, that's a problem with all transportation). But at least the bikes go somewhere predictable (a bike station) and the operator can pick them up and bring them back for the next round of commuters (Hubway does just this).

A dockless bike share operator would have the same issue, except that the bikes wouldn't go anywhere predictable, so the only way to get bikes from one place to another would be to pay someone to drive around and find them wherever they are. That's not scalable or feasible. So most of these bikes will wind up getting one ride a day from commuters, if that (but probably a lot less). And they'll pile up in places during the day. The point of Hubway as an operator is to help rebalance the system (which they don't always do a great job of). Plus there's the question of: if each of these bicycles has a single user, why not just buy your own bike? And when there's a foot and a half of snow, do these bikes just sit in ice until they melt, or does someone schlep around with a shovel to rescue each one? Maybe they're a gateway drug to biking more, but I sort of wonder.

What Hubway might be concerned about is losing some of the lucrative tourist business. I pay $99 a year for Hubway (well, less, my employer subsidizes it) for all the rides I can take. A lot of tourists are happy to $8 per day to ride, and then to pay overtime fees, because what's a $20 ride when you've dropped $250 on a hotel room and $600 on flights and $40 for a trolley tour duck tour or—good lord—$60 for an hour-long Segue tour. The city probably wants to soak the tourists, and I'm kind of okay with that to subsidize a service that actually works for commuters.

The dockless bike finance model seems to be the Lyft/Uber model (or the Underpants Gnome model): put a lot of things out on the road, ???, profit. $350 per bike capital cost, so if you can get 4 rides per day you'll pay it back within 90 days, hooray! Except that you have to have some staff, the bikes are going to get abused, rebalanced, etc, and the operational costs of a dockless system are higher than the a dock system (albeit with lower capital costs). If each bike has to get "rescued" from somewhere and brought back in to the system once a week and serviced once a month, that's five touches a month. If each takes an hour of personnel time (to get to the bike, and then bring it somewhere) and you can get away with paying someone $20 per hour (with overhead costs included, this isn't much) you're looking at an operational cost of $1200 per year. Now you'd need those 4 rides per day (apparently, in China, it's 3.2 rides per bike per day, and the company started because people kept stealing bikes) just to cover these costs. And you can't afford to have bikes parked in people's yards, or pushed in to the bushes, or thrown in the river, or just parked behind a wall where it's hard to find them and they can't get a great GPS signal, because then they generate no money. And at least right now there's no price discrimination, so there's no upside for tourist business. Plus if they're getting this much ridership, people probably figure out they can just buy a goddamn bike and a U-lock.

Boston/Cambridge/Brookline/Somerville probably realizes that if these bikes are basically abandoned property and removed, it pretty quickly kills off the questionable business model once and for all. The dockless companies can suggest that people leave them in allowable spaces (bike racks, street signs, public property not blocking sidewalks) but they have no enforcement mechanism. And the city does have an interest in keeping the sidewalks clear. I'd say the cities' policy should be something along the lines of "We'll let these bikes in, but if they're left somewhere illegal, we're removing them, just like we would with any other bicycle." Except since the dockless bikes (generally) don't have to be locked up, they don't have to get someone out from DPW with an angle grinder.

So anyway, this was a total ramble, but I don't believe the dockless bike hype.