Charlotte Bike / Scooter Sharing

[kermit]

2 hours ago, KJHburg said:

I know that is an issue in some intown neighborhoods I would call the police and have it towed.  

And this gets to the essence of the thread. If a bike is blocking the sidewalk its easy to move, a car is such a PITA to get moved that we ignore them when they block the sidewalk.

[JoshuaDrown]

5 hours ago, KJHburg said:

HOWEVER if I saw a handicapped or elderly person coming up that sidewalk I would have thrown into the parking lot to clear the public sidewalk. 2. What would you have done?  3. I am not in the business of placing bikes all over town.  

Clearly this issue has level headed people losing some clarity. Throwing a bike into a parking lot doesn't teach the person who left it there a lesson, they are long gone. Throwing a bike into a parking lot doesn't teach the bike share company a lesson, they blame it on the rider. Throwing a bike into a parking lot doesn't teach the bike a lesson, its not sentient. 

Throwing a bike into a parking lot only hurts sustainability efforts, and it harms transit options for Charlotteans that desperately need affordable first mile/last mile mobility solutions. Throwing a bike into a parking lot is lashing out in all the wrong ways. 

"What would I have done?" On my walk to my office and back home today, a rough circle of Poplar to Bearden, Church to MLK, Tryon to Trade... I came across 5 bikes that I  adjusted positioning for, and six that were down and I sat back up. All told I added maybe an extra 45-seconds to my commute, but my hope... my hope is that I'm a small part of the solution.

[archiham04]

I moved a Lime bike to a more secure location this morning.  The bike started talking.  It told me that I need to pay for my ride, or it was going to call the police.

[tozmervo]

2 hours ago, archiham04 said:

I moved a Lime bike to a more secure location this morning.  The bike started talking.  It told me that I need to pay for my ride, or it was going to call the police.

BAD TOUCH

[dubone]

They need to have an easier way to tattle on the last person who parked it badly.     Those people are going to spoil a good thing. 

 

There is a way to report an issue with the bike after booking it, but not to easily report a problem otherwise.   The official way is to call them, which is really not a very good way of dealing with the issue.    Right at this very minute, there is a lime bike in the dead center of the sidewalk near me, and there is an entire cluster of the yellow (Ofo? ) bikes blocking the whole sidewalk down the other sidewalk.  

 

It's a PITA, and needs to be some sort of way to get the offenders to stop or else it is going to be cracked down by the city and we will lose the good thing.  

[JoshuaDrown]

I'll just leave this here:

 

[tozmervo]

15 minutes ago, JoshuaDrown said:

I'll just leave this here:

CRINGE. CRINGE. CRINGE.

[Matthew.Brendan]

lol that was awesome. 

[KJHburg]

not bike sharing per se but Raleigh is doing cycletrack for 5 blocks linking their downtown to their booming Glenwood South area (somewhat like our SouthEnd)

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/traffic/article194926724.html

 

[SouthEndCLT811]

Also wanted to share this, we're not the only ones dealing with the bike share etiquette.  Same companies even

https://qz.com/1058438/chinese-cities-saying-enough-already-to-chaos-generated-by-bike-sharing-services-like-ofo-and-mobike/

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-shanghai-bikes/index.html

I saw these on a trip at People's Park in Shanghai this summer and thought it to be fairly organized.  Doesn't seem to be the case everywhere though.

Edited January 16, 2018 by SouthEndCLT811

[AuLukey]

I’ll weigh in. I’ve held my tongue as I’ve never really seen the issue until yesterday. The saturation has gotten to the point where we are going to reach a tipping point for collective community annoyance soon. I love bike sharing, I think it is great for the community and will help to evolve the car-culture in Charlotte, but something needs to change before a regrettable law is enacted.

I don’t think this practice detracts from our urban fabric. Heck, sometimes it even ADDS to the aesthetic of the streetscape:



What I feel the real problem has become is a lack of proper regulations and enforcement on the part of Charlotte city officials.

Let’s use Europe as the first example. Sure, bicycles have been a mainstay of that culture for decades. While we can only widen existing sidewalks so much, we can use them as a model of sustainability for bike riding/sharing in the urban environment. It may be the personal ownership which drives the responsibility and conformity of riders there (you don’t park it properly, you won’t have a bike for long.) Maybe the rental culture is where the disconnect is made. But rental cars are not left just anywhere. Why? Because drivers know they will be ticketed for improperly parking them. Why should that be different with bicycles?

The second example in which to compare would be San Francisco. I spent a few days there recently and cannot recall a single Bikeshare bike being left in public right-of-way. Why? Because it appeared that 99% of the bikes there were in docking stations rather than freestanding. There were a TON of these stations. But they were always placed in appropriate, non-obtrusive locations. Parks weren’t littered with them, they were all corralled properly in their designated areas. So either they have local legislation inhibiting the stand-alone Bikeshare bikes (They started accepting permits for them in June 2017 according to the SFMTA website,) or they already have a critical mass due to the stations currently in place.

Point being, other cities can do it properly, so Charlotte can learn by their example before the issue comes to a head.

[Scribe]

3 hours ago, AuLukey said:

Point being, other cities can do it properly, so Charlotte can learn by their example before the issue comes to a head.

I agree with you - Charlotte needs to evolve and learn from places that have solved these problems.

Surprising enough, this weekend I've been impressed to find the bikes neat and not as annoying as in weekends past.  Maybe it was the route I took on my walk, but it seemed like there were bikes, but never in the flow of pedestrians. Maybe there is some communication happening from the city to the bike-share companies? (I sure hope there is)

[kermit]

10,000 rail trail users at 2:30 today (according to the counter at Tremont). I would not have been surprised if 3,000 of them were on dockless. 

Lime bike people were at Sycamore rebalancing using a rental truck without anything to attach bikes to. Looked awkward.

[videtur quam contuor]

Overwhelming number of cyclists at Olde Mecklenburg this afternoon. They took half the street for half a block and there were swarms approaching from both directions. I could see only a few dockless bikes. These bikers were the biking regulars who may have been on a brewery to brewery run. I saw a biker with a Legion shirt. Just too many bikers to select who was on what bike. Lenny Boy had a few bikes, and two dockless.

[kermit]

2 hours ago, Scribe said:

Surprising enough, this weekend I've been impressed to find the bikes neat and not as annoying as in weekends past. 

Me too.

I didn't see a single poorly parked dockless bike in a two hour ride around Southend today. Having said that it looked like just about every bike was being ridden (so thats certainly gonna mitigate the parking issue)

[15895]

26 minutes ago, kermit said:

Me too.

I didn't see a single poorly parked dockless bike in a two hour ride around Southend today. Having said that it looked like just about every bike was being ridden (so thats certainly gonna mitigate the parking issue)

Me and a few friends rode around SouthEnd to Frazier park and back. 

 

People using bikeshare hare absolutely everywhere. Tons. And like you said, none were in a bad spot, it didn’t look tacky, they weren’t everywhere.

 

I heard one guy said “look at all the bikers! It’s crazy” 

 

Of the many, many, many bikeshare riders. Only one couple used BCycle. And I was wondering why they would choose BCycle and scurry from station to station in 30 minutes for 8$

 

So, obviously winter was a bad time to introduce all these bikeshares. Now that it’s warm, we can all try them and realize they are amazing 

[kermit]

The dockless bikes certainly appear to be a huge boon for the occasional recreational biker and more butts on bikes is always a positive for urbanism.

Having said that, I'll get the ball rolling on the next round of beotching about dockless -- the weekend warriors are atrocious riders and they make 'real' biking more dangerous since you can't predict their behavior. I say this with a tone of irony -- its way better to have idiots on bikes than in cars.

Edited January 21, 2018 by kermit

[KJHburg]

I am Miami's Brickell area for a few days. I saw a few of the  CitiBank docked bike stations.  (Looks like Citibank sponsored them or something) Some seemed to be use but I though the price was high but maybe I am not in the know about this. $24 for 24 hours, or $4.50 per hour which I thought was a little high.  However I did not see any dockless bikes around this skyscraper district.    This particular one I took a photo of did not have a lot in use but another I saw near the Metrorail was almost empty. 

[deleted]

Spin has a handlebar hanger indicating that ALL rides in January are free.  Again, good for the consumer for as long as it lasts.  Also, not a bad strategy (IMO).  If the bikes are everywhere and they all have the same basic pricing model, the winner is likely to be the company who is the most successful at getting customers to download their app (because most people won't download all four).

[lit]

Seems our friends at Tilt had a little fun Sunday night

[15895]

1 hour ago, lit said:

Seems our friends at Tilt had a little fun Sunday night

 

Please tell me that’s photoshopped.

 that pisses me off. Usually things like this don’t bother me, I think it’s funny, whatever. 

But this is annoying because it’s such a great asset to the city but people are being S*itholes. And I like them. I don’t want them to go away.

[Miesian Corners]

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/dallas/article195787284.html
 

It's not just Charlotte that's having problems (I had to dodge one lying in the right lane of Randolph Road last night). At least the art community in Dallas is getting creative with them.

[deleted]

7 minutes ago, Miesian Corners said:

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/dallas/article195787284.html
 

It's not just Charlotte that's having problems (I had to dodge one lying in the right lane of Randolph Road last night). At least the art community in Dallas is getting creative with them.

I mean, you could literally just change Dallas to Charlotte in the article and re-run this in the Observer.  

At the risk of offending anyone here, I found the Dallas "art installation" amusing...

[dubone]

It simultaneously amusing satire, annoying that so many people are not being conscientious in their use of the bikes, and the utility of this new system is off the charts useful.  I have used them so many times where B-cycle was not useful at all, even if their bikes weren't garbage.     That reminded me, I just canceled my b-cycle auto-renewal just now.  

 

The solution to the problem with the new generation of bike shares is within their systems.   Very simply a fee/fine when someone reports that a bike you used last is not in a good place.   But in the mean time, an easy way to report it would be the most important next step.   

[kermit]

I crossed the street a couple times yesterday to pick up fallen bikes. It was very satisfying. It might be my new thing.