Rue des Tournelles, Paris, November 5, 2019. Four Voi scooters wait hopefully for potential clients, with a Lime and Dott sprawling nearby. Behind them, a Velib’ rider has made his choice.
Leighton Kille/The Conversation France
In major cities around the world, dockless scooters and bikes are everywhere, yet the companies themselves are often breathtakingly short-lived. Basic economic concepts give us clues why.
Every day, e-scooters and helmets are put out together, but some people ride without helmets and at the end of each day helmets are missing. So what can be done to ensure safe riding behaviour?
Public bikes are meant to complement a city’s existing mass transit network, so the location of docking stations is critical.
MusikAnimal/Wikimedia
Under 10 percent of new Citi Bike and Divvy bike docks are sited where residents suggested using interactive online maps, a new study shows. But that doesn't mean city officials weren't listening.
If cyclist-friendly cities like Copenhagen can offer abundant and conveniently sited parking space for bikes, why not Australian cities?
Grey Geezer/Wikimedia
If cities had backed their active transport goals with investment in adequate cycling infrastructure we might not be having the arguments about dockless bikes 'littering' public space.
People use share bikes for many reasons, including health benefits and even because they like the design.
Richard Masoner/Bay Area Bike Share launch in San Jose CA/Flickr
Urban planners often hope bike-share schemes might reduce reliance on cars and help with congestion. But very few of those who use share bikes have switched from driving.
Bike-sharing schemes work when users leave the bikes in safe places that don’t inconvenience others, so why doesn’t everyone do that?
David Moir/AAP
Mental short-cuts guide our everyday decision-making. Unfortunately, five biases can lead us to deny responsibility for our poor decisions and are creating problems for share-bike schemes.
Share-bikes can litter our cities and be found in rivers, up trees, in gutters, and strewn around public places.
Obikes in unusual places/Facebook
If we're going to intervene to stop the dumping of share bikes, we need to understand the bad behaviour in the first place, then design effective measures to change how bike users behave.
Information about who rides where and when is useful for city planners and policymakers, but also a valuable commodity in its own right.
AAP
Australians can see the impact of dockless bike sharing on the streets of their cities. The huge store of data collected about user journeys is less visible, but just as important.
Dramatic images of "bike graveyards" shouldn't be taken at face value – there's hope for bike-sharing schemes yet.
Bikesharing has exploded in popularity in recent years, including in New York with the Citi Bike program, but the pricing structures have been a cause for concern.
NYCDOT/Flickr via CC BY-SA-ND
Bikesharing has boomed in Europe and North America in recent years following decades of slow growth since its introduction on the streets of Amsterdam in 1965. Like any industry undergoing rapid expansion…
Adjunct Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Co-Director, Transportation Sustainability Research Center, University of California, Berkeley