Dockless e-bike hire launched in Milton Keynes

[Racing roadkill]

We’ve had a scheme near me for a while ( Southampton). It didn’t take long until someone hired one and rode it to Bournemouth, then lots of them got vandalised, including one that found its way into a basketball hoop at a playground, then it was set alight. There have also been a lot of them smashed up. The scheme works well in places though.

 

[mjr]

Ok, it has a canal, a river, lakes, ponds, lagoons and reservoirs(?) ... Plenty of wet places to dump expensive e-bikes!

That's why I'm hoping Lime's alarms and trackers work well enough to catch the criminals who've already trashed at least one bike share system...

 

[Smokin Joe]

Better hope the dockless e-bikes have fully waterproofed electrics. I can imagine them getting fished out of the water after a few weeks and working about as well as a car that's been submerged in a flood! This must be a Foreign-sponsored venture with absolutely no idea about the behavioural mentality of a significant portion of the UK population. No sane person who understands how many mindless morons we have over here would even contemplate putting money into a scheme using expensive, thief-attracting e-bikes. You'd go for hairshirt single speeds with oddball parts and try to make them both worthless for stripping for spares and virtually indestructible.

I doubt there is a town or city anywhere in the UK where this scheme would last five minutes. Remember public phone boxes?

 

[stalagmike]

I've seen a bunch of these at the end of our high street in Stony Stratford (MK). Haven't seen anyone riding one yet. I don't agree that scrotes will nick them to fashion their own e-bikes, that would take too much work. More they would just trash them for the 'fun' of it.

 

[Drago]

Too many tempting rivers near Stony Stratford! Lets hope theyre amphibious.

 

[ColinJ]

I doubt there is a town or city anywhere in the UK where this scheme would last five minutes. Remember public phone boxes?

We have the opposite problem at our local railway stations. The hire bikes not only don't get stolen, they don't even get hired!

I asked the man in the ticket office at Hebden Bridge station how often people hired the bikes. He replied "Once or twice". When I asked if he meant per day, or per week. He replied that it was since they had been provided, over a year previously! (It doesn't help that an account has to be set up in advance. You can't just arrive at the station, see the bikes, and decide to hire one.)

 

[mjr]

I asked the man in the ticket office at Hebden Bridge station how often people hired the bikes. He replied "Once or twice". When I asked if he meant per day, or per week. He replied that it was since they had been provided, over a year previously! (It doesn't help that an account has to be set up in advance. You can't just arrive at the station, see the bikes, and decide to hire one.)

Is that Bike & Go? As well as the wait for a membership card to arrive in the post, what's also crippled that is it's a hodge-podge of stations (not even all of any operator's stations has it) and you can't generally hire or return the bike when the station is unstaffed (some stations now have key postboxes but not all), plus at some of the more desirable stations like Norwich, it was £10/day hire instead of £3.80. So they annoyed the early adopters and guaranteed a load of bad feeling spreading through cycling communities. I hope it recovers but it really will take some time.

 

[mustang1]

I was wondering about the method of recharging but it seems they will have a team of operators tracking the bikes around the city, locating them and then swapping out the batteries as the charge levels drop. Doesn't seem very sustainable to me?

I don't think they're doing it for sustainability, but for profit. They might talk about sustainable transport, but dollars is higher up on the list of priorities IMHO.

 

[ColinJ]

Is that Bike & Go? As well as the wait for a membership card to arrive in the post, what's also crippled that is it's a hodge-podge of stations (not even all of any operator's stations has it) and you can't generally hire or return the bike when the station is unstaffed (some stations now have key postboxes but not all), plus at some of the more desirable stations like Norwich, it was £10/day hire instead of £3.80. So they annoyed the early adopters and guaranteed a load of bad feeling spreading through cycling communities. I hope it recovers but it really will take some time.

Yes.

They have been available in the Calder Valley for a number of years now, but despite cycling thousands of miles in the valley in that time, I have never seen a single one of those bikes in use (and I do take notice of the bikes that people ride)!

 

[I like Skol]

I don't think they're doing it for sustainability, but for profit. They might talk about sustainable transport, but dollars is higher up on the list of priorities IMHO.

I didn't mean sustainable as in an environmentally fluffy nice kind of way but purely the financial cost of having operatives roving the city, delivering electricity by hand doesn't sound like a sustainable business model to me.

 

[Drago]

Mistang makes a fair point. Even sustainable business projects achieve little, because the shareholders spend the dividends on Porsches, foreign holidays, needless consumer tat. It's all con, and people continue to fall for it.

 

[tom73]

Oh yes bike and go we have some at our station quietly rusting away. Not one has ever moved since they arrived a few years ago even the poster telling you about them has seen better days. As @mjr points out they are not quite user friendly.

 

[fossyant]

Won't last long. I do miss Mobike in Manchester, but too many selfish folk in this world.

 

[beepbeep]

quote Private Frazer..........'''DOOOMED, DOOOOOOMED''