If you’ve been to Lower Greenville, the Katy trail, or White Rock Lake in the past few months you will have noticed the hundreds of dollar an hour bikes that litter the sidewalks and pathways. There were over two hundred and fifty complaints in the first eighteen days of January alone about these bikes which have had no regulations on where they can be placed. There has been talks by the city of council Dallas for regulating these bike share companies. Recently Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax sent a statement to these bike share companies “may be left with no choice but to begin removing bicycles in its rights of way, sidewalks, trails and/or trail heads that are identified
One thing that I find interesting is that in lime bikes 2017 year end report they said that they had 45,000 active users in Dallas and Lime Bike alone has 15,000 bikes (each Lime bike costs around 2,500 dollars per bike). That’s about 3 riders per bike which means many bikes are left unused for a majority of the day with a high supply of bikes but a low demand to ride them This creates problems for both people and the bike share companies. This results in a majority of bikes being unused, and since it’s a dock free system the main place they get left are sidewalks and pathways which are inconvenient to others who do not use the bikes. The problem for the bike companies is that they are not currently making profits according to the economist.com the companies aren’t even making profits yet based off of data from Ofo and Mobike. Over the next few months its going to be interesting to see how these companies try to increase their size and revenue while also fighting the restrictions by thew city. These companies to increase revenue needs to increase the size of their fleet so they will increase their capitol but that also means they will need more land to put the bikes.
21st Century Citizenship 