Photo by ep-jhu

More “butts on bikes” is truly fantastic. To hear that dockless bikes are serving new bike share communities is something to be celebrated and embraced.

I see this photo and I think, wow, those are some serious bike skills. I look again and think, yes! Dockless bike share really is working. I see the dockless bikes all around D.C. and I love it because I also see empty docks in the morning (bike share is very popular here). 

I read the article and feel sad, ashamed for my new city. I wish so badly that dockless bike share was all over Chicago the same way I see bikeshare everywhere in D.C. I hope Chicago can earn it's "friendliest bike city" ranking by embracing more people on bikes. 

From the article:

Some of the complaints are warranted — badly-parked bikes may be a mere annoyance for some, but a genuine obstacle for those with mobility challenges and/or visual impairment. Others are irritated when people bring the bikes inside their homes but they still show up on the app as being available for use.

However, other complaints seem downright suspect.

Why are you assuming that bike is stolen?

Dockless bikeshares seem especially popular with teenagers in DC — as a recent CityLab article pointed out, with black boys in particular. (It’s worth noting that the companies do not collect this type of demographic data about their users.) There’s been a lot of Twitter and comment speculation about whether many of these dockless bikes are stolen — though there’s no proof of that.

The Twitter and comment grumblings came to a head the other week on a Georgetown listserv, when a disgruntled resident urged neighbors to call the police to report dockless bikeshare users merely for riding down the street.

When being given advice about getting around D.C., I was told by life-long residents that Georgetown is hard to get to because the residents didn't want public transportation bringing people to their neighborhood (there are NO metro stops in Georgetown). You can fill in the blanks on the bigoted reasoning behind that. So while this listserv response saddens me deeply, it does not surprise me. It's not acceptable. It's not ok. Bikeshare is for everyone and that's the best thing about it.

The full article:

https://ggwash.org/view/66280/its-ok-to-critique-dockless-bikesare-...