Bikeshare users-- what are you doing about helmets?

(this would be a good use of a poll feature if there was one, so users could respond anonymously)

I have not yet made use of Divvy but will very likely be perusing Denver's B-Cycle on an upcoming trip.... looking to travel light and not excited about dragging a helmet along... plus the friend I'm going with doesn't own one as far as I know.

So are you generally carrying a helmet around with you? Or have you just got comfortable going without? Or some other solution I am not touching on?

Thx.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by h' Zerocats on August 28, 2013 at 11:48am

Ultimately, we never used the bike share in Denver. We needed to pay for buses almost every day, and an additional $8 just didn't make sense. We saw a fair number of people using them. It seemed to be very common and accepted to ride on the sidewalk there along the main drags. We used AirBnB (good experience)- our host warned us that they ticket for riding on the sidewalk, but you wouldn't know it except on the 16th street mall (Denver's State Street/ N Michigan Ave) where "no bike" signs were posted everywhere. I was wishing for some kind of elegant solution for having a rear-view mirror while walking....The secondary through streets sometimes had off-street bike paths adjacent, very occasionally had bike lanes. Cyclists riding in the street kept mostly to side streets. The bus racks are heavily used, and I saw drivers letting people take bikes into the bus when the racks were full.

A common sight was someone riding their own bike together with someone on a Divvy.

I should note that we stuck purely to the east/northeast side and downtown-- can't speak for the rest of the city.

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Permalink Reply by Tony Adams on August 28, 2013 at 11:57am

When Julie put out the call for a Chainlink tagline, this is all I could think of.

Dann B (5.25 mi/8.75 mi) said:

Wait, isn't that what the Chainlink is?

Anne Alt said:

Should we just have a topic for Howard, Duppie and Kevin to rant at each other? ;)

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Permalink Reply by Bez on August 28, 2013 at 1:11pm

I very nearly posted "A place for Howard, Duppie, and Kevin to rant at each other" as a tagline suggestion. Then I decided I didn't want the Wrath of Julie™, so I didn't.

Tony Adams 7 mi said:

When Julie put out the call for a Chainlink tagline, this is all I could think of.

Dann B (5.25 mi/8.75 mi) said:

Wait, isn't that what the Chainlink is?

Anne Alt said:

Should we just have a topic for Howard, Duppie and Kevin to rant at each other? ;)

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Permalink Reply by David Barish on August 28, 2013 at 3:40pm

I have not read this thread in a while. I am not going to read the comments behind but take it there has been some disagreement. I will relay this story and a call to the engineers and wannabe designers out there.

While riding with a friend recently we talked about Divvy and what to do about using a helmet. We wondered when somebody will design a foldable,portable, reusable but ultimately disposable helmet. ( I recall reading about the Israeli who designed a cardboard bike) We imagined a type of cardboard that could be used perhaps 5, 10 or 20 times but would eventually need to be recycled. If such a helmet could be sold for $10 in a vending machine by a station I suspect it would get well used. As we rode we riffed on the subject. Perhaps a sponsor could put their logo on the helmets to help underwrite costs. That sponsorship could change. Perhaps local artists could put their work on the helmet and be featured for a while adding to the cultural landscape. Neither of us are engineers, marketers or entrepreneurs. Just dreaming cyclists.

Go create. We await what may follow.

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Permalink Reply by h' Zerocats on August 28, 2013 at 3:54pm

Another observation-- the bikes all looked 'old' (not necessarily in bad shape, but they very clearly didn't have that 'sheen' that ours still do) and I want to say I didn't see any stations anywhere that seemed more than half full, most about 1/3 full, regardless of time of day-- with one exception being the downtown transit center that had three stations put together and most likely had just been refilled in preparation for the evening rush. The overall impression was that there are about 1/2 the bikes circulating in the system as dock capacity.

h' 1.0 said:

Ultimately, we never used the bike share in Denver. We needed to pay for buses almost every day, and an additional $8 just didn't make sense. We saw a fair number of people using them. It seemed to be very common and accepted to ride on the sidewalk there along the main drags. We used AirBnB (good experience)- our host warned us that they ticket for riding on the sidewalk, but you wouldn't know it except on the 16th street mall (Denver's State Street/ N Michigan Ave) where "no bike" signs were posted everywhere. I was wishing for some kind of elegant solution for having a rear-view mirror while walking....The secondary through streets sometimes had off-street bike paths adjacent, very occasionally had bike lanes. Cyclists riding in the street kept mostly to side streets. The bus racks are heavily used, and I saw drivers letting people take bikes into the bus when the racks were full.

A common sight was someone riding their own bike together with someone on a Divvy.

I should note that we stuck purely to the east/northeast side and downtown-- can't speak for the rest of the city.