| I generally dislike stations (since they're never plentiful and rarely conveniently placed). But I think they're a good idea in high-traffic locations - e.g., next to Caltrain stations. They tamp down on the chaos of bikes piled up by the careless. For a bike share program to be useful to me, it needs to do a few things: 1) The bike must be within a 3-minute walk of where I am right now. 2) I must be able to ditch the bike within a 3-minute walk of where I want to be. 3) The bike must actually be where I'm told it is. Or they must be so ubiquitous that I could trip over them if I'm not looking. 4) The bike must be in good working order and be obviously faster and more efficient than walking. For the Google campus bikes, for example, this is a problem. Most of them are slightly broken most of the time, such that it's usually faster to just run. 5) Be cost-and-time competitive against rideshare, personal bike ownership, mass-transit, and running shoes. I wish you the best of luck - I think there's a lot of room for human-powered transportation to be super awesome in an area with such benign weather. |