Seattle has a bike share system called Pronto, which was also designed to fail, but for mostly different reasons. But there's some overlap. Like yours, ours can only be used for one bike at a time, which isn't especially family friendly. (We have other rental options in the city though, which would be better choices for this sort of thing.) A rental is good for 24 hours, but only 30 minutes at a time. The idea is you ride the bike from a station near you to a station near where you're going (grocery store, for example), do what you need, and ride the bike to your next destination. Sadly we don't have enough stations, they're cluttered heavily in a few parts of the city, occasionally the stations are full so people trying to return their bikes can't and this can result in extra charges (even during the 24 hour period you paid for). And the bikes are seriously lousy, the brakes are barely up to the city's hills.