Now some racist will come and pull up stats about African immigrants doing this. People please, stop. Facts have no place here. Don't trigger us. African immigrants, are single young adults running away from terrible conditions that caused them to lose their women and kids, and are coming to enrich Europe. Don't scare them. Give them your daughters.
Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#42Do “dockless” bike hire systems actually work anywhere? There seem to have been so many stories like this. Docked systems seem to work really well (e.g. London), presumably because you can’t take a bike without leaving your credit card details.
I used the Gobee.bike rental service in both Turin and Milan, and the only vandalism I encountered were two bikes that had been thrown into the Navigli canal, other than that it didn't appear to be much of a problem in Italy. For the French market maybe they need to look into attaching the device to a physical object (lamp post, docking station), other than just locking the rear wheel, to keep the oppurtunists at bay.
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#43I have met a few people who have a very personal vendetta against these bike rental companies. They see them as cluttering the streets and operating without the proper licencing and permissions. To rectify the issue, they will happily throw 50 bikes into the river each time they pass a parking area. They see it as doing the government/the people a favour. The guy I spoke to who did this didn't have a smartphone, so I…
Eh. The government sure seems like a sect. I don't mean by itself, but some people treat it like one, and are becoming a part of the sect they've made up in their heads. Edit: it'd be nice if the downvoters explained why did they downvote.
> Edit: it'd be nice if the downvoters explained why did they downvote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#44I have met a few people who have a very personal vendetta against these bike rental companies. They see them as cluttering the streets and operating without the proper licencing and permissions. To rectify the issue, they will happily throw 50 bikes into the river each time they pass a parking area. They see it as doing the government/the people a favour. The guy I spoke to who did this didn't have a smartphone, so I…
There seems to be very little love for these bicycle companies and their aggressive and border-line illegal tactics of establishing themselves — i.e., it's not just petty vandalism and theft. People who normally wouldn't condone destruction of property appear to make an exception for these bicycle dumpers.
The common approach these companies take is to try to establish their brand as the leading one in a large city, so that in time they can turn a profit due to their scale and dominance. To get there, they need to beat the competition first. Because this is a new type of enterprise and a novel use of public space, they simply start operating, and hope to persuade the local government of their merits in the course of operating their business.
In a city like Amsterdam, where a bunch of these companies popped up overnight, this caused a sudden increase in the number of bicycles parked on the city streets (most people in Amsterdam already own their own beat-up city-bicycle which tends to be parked in front of their houses) that took on such a worrying scale that the municipal government banned them for now. These companies lost their bet in Amsterdam until regulation is in place, but they will continue to push their business model everywhere.
What makes otherwise reasonable people irate is the way these companies are laying claim to our public streets without taking responsibility for the consequences. Their business model depends on smartphone apps that show users the nearest available bicycle, instead of having dedicated parking spaces for them. So as a consequence of this model, users leave their rented bicycles wherever they dismount, because it stops being their problem at that point, and the pickup trucks that gather these bicycles from inconvenient locations for repair and redistribution tend to leave them in places with a lot of pedestrian traffic, blocking the pedestrian paths in the process.
People tend to not like it when local inhabitants can't pass through a street with a pram or a wheelchair without stepping onto the car lanes because someone dumped a bunch of brightly coloured rent-a-bikes on the footpath.
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#45Looks like notracist has been downvoted to hell by racists already.
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#46What did they expect ? Criminality is high in France, and higher in Paris.
Got some figures to back up that claim? http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/France/Unit...
Here [0] are some stats from 2016 provided by the French Home Office.
[0] https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Interstats/Actualites/Insecuri...
Edit: More up to date stats from 2017 here: https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Interstats/Actualites/Insecuri...
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#47For some reason nobody talks about the extreme nuisance of those bikes. Customers would just drop them literally anywhere : on the sidewalk blocking pedestrians, right in the middle of the street blocking cars, in front of building doors preventing people from entering, etc... Such a terrible nuisance, and something to be expected since there is such little room in the Parisian streets (you can’t seriously expect cus…
> For some reason nobody talks about the extreme nuisance of those bikes.
In Melbourne where we have oBike no-one talks about anything else.
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#48[deleted]
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh. The government sure seems like a sect. I don't mean by itself, but some people treat it like one, and are becoming a part of the sect they've made up in their heads. Edit: it'd be nice if the downvoters explained why did they downvote.
> Edit: it'd be nice if the downvoters explained why did they downvote. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I didn't get any new downvotes after the edit, but I don't really care about the downvotes, it's the lack of explanation that bugs me. I never edited comments like this until one month ago because there was no need, but that changed since around half a year ago when I noticed that instead of participating in a discussion, people just downvote. I don't think that the purpose of downvotes should be to disagree without saying anything, that creates a very toxic environment, so I'm trying to encourage people to discuss.
Also, I didn't comment about voting. I replied to a comment and then added a line about the downvotes later (after I got downvoted without any explanation) because I don't feel good in this kind of environment.
Edit: apparently now I'm "posting too fast" (2 comments per hour is fast? OK...), so there's my reply to the child comment that says it seems trollish: "Yeah I agree - if there wasn't the explanatory sentence after that. You can't just downvote the whole comment based on its first sentence, it has a completely different meaning without the rest."
Re: Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
#50I wonder who these bikes are supposed to appeal to. If you are a cyclist then you have your own bicycle, or you have a choice of bicycles. You don't leave the door with your bike left behind so you can take the heavier, possibly vandalised, possibly unavailable public transport bike in order to get to your destination later. Sometimes when catching the train I cannot take a bicycle. In theory I could hire a bike at t…
The main advantage is that you can combine them with public transportation: you take a dockless bike to an underground/bus station, then once you get off you take another dockless bike to the destination, which effectively gives you very cheap and very fast transportation from anywhere to anywhere.
The other advantages are not having to worry about theft, being able to get a bike wherever you are even if you didn't anticipate it, and being able to get somewhere by bike and go back in a car with someone else or vice versa.