Originally Posted by canklecat

A friend is the chief mechanic for our city bike program. The bikes take a lot of abuse, despite the seemingly overbuilt construction. If you watch enough folks riding city bikes around town you realize many are inexperienced cyclists and bash across potholes and curbs, wobbling around and falling quite a bit.

My Globe Carmel, the bike I resumed cycling with in 2015, seems massively overbuilt but at 30-35 lbs it's a lightweight compared with city bikes.

Most folks who work in the docked city bike programs oppose the Lime Bikes and similar dockless bike programs. While dockless is fine in theory, as with all things along the lines of libertarian and anarchic they fail in actual practice due to fallible humans.

While Dallas hasn't yet been overrun like China with dockless bikes, it's already been noted several times on social media that Lime Bikes have been scattered across public egress, blocking ramps for disabled folks, forcing pedestrians to walk into the street around the scattered bikes.

To be pragmatic dockless bikes would work only if deposits, fees and penalties were increased to discourage irresponsible users, and to encourage more responsible usage. Unless that is adopted the dockless system is doomed to fail in the U.S.

Too bad because it's great in theory. I declined to participate in our local city bike program because the 30 minute time limit and lack of docks on my end of town made it infeasible. The city bike system is geared toward the affluent redevelopment of the downtown and near-downtown. It's not intended to supplement public transportation for the folks who live on the outskirts. So I bought my own city bike type of beast of burden. Great for errands and casual rides, but I mostly ride my lighter hybrid and road bikes now.