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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit curious about the dockless bike shares too, I suspect the same thing.

I'm not as certain about that. Potentially optimistic, but I could imagine bikes taking on a larger role as we move to self driving cars.

If you read threads about biking[0], people seem to be motivated to bike more than they are motivated to drive. Although these same people are stymied by negative conditions. Self driving cars could improve biking conditions by opening up roadways, making them safer, providing better point to point transit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420271

I think I agree with the biking in general, self driving cars will probably make biking a lot safer both by reducing the chances of an idiot running into you, and reducing the number of parked cars on roads (riding beside parked cars is scary, because you are never sure when a door is going to open into you).

I don't think that I necessarily agree that this means bike shares will succeed though, I think private bike ownership has a lot going for it.

I have a bike and there are bike shares around me. I am still trying to figure out a policy, but I lean towards bike share for everything short, because it’s like a taxi, you don’t need to go back to your bike. But bike share are crappy, so for longer distance I need bigger wheels and gears.

I was skeptical about the business model, the bikes cost a lot, are rented for cheap, and for some reasons the companies go head to head in the same towns instead of covering different areas.

And if they kill each other and the winner raises the price, I suspect Detroit wins.

Yeah, the biking model seems fairly easy to speculate on, but sort of hard to pin down. Here's some speculation from a per bike perspective.

Revenue

  daily rides*365*$1

Costs

    $250 per bike
  + $15 per month for maintenance
  + 20% chance of catastrophe amortized over the fleet
  = ~$500

+ rebalancers + insurance + overhead?

So maybe 2 rides per bike per day gets them in the green?

My city recently got them, and we currently have more bikes than NYC. It was rough at first but people are taking them a lot now, and its increased bicycling in general even outside of bike shares.

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