Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to 'mass destruction' of its dockless bike fleet

[Samuel D]

You could give a link to the Jeffries piece. I agree with him and have found walking in Paris to have got appreciably harder and riskier-feeling in the last few years for the reasons he lists. (Though the yellow pestilence is from the last few months.)

The other thing is car parking on the kerb. As vehicles have got wider and even less appropriate for our cities, this practice has become more socially acceptable. But there are many times I cannot fit between a car straddling the already narrow kerb and the building alongside. How people with wheelchairs or buggies cope I cannot imagine.

[Audax67]

The Law says to leave a metre, but then it also says to give cyclists 1m50 clearance.

As you say, 'twas not ever thus:

[PH]

Free to use bikes seems to be one those things that city councillors love to implement despite the fact that bike thieves have no compunction about stealing them.

I don't understand your comment? I thought councillors loved them because they believed them to be a good idea and there's no cost to the council.

[mjr]

Ofo leaves the UK. It seems the British are thugs and vandals and can't be trusted. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... -of-london

[peetee]

... How people with wheelchairs or buggies cope I cannot imagine.

To be fair this is not a recent thing. Twenty years ago I was regularly pushing my twin babies around in a side by side buggy and had to take to the road or elbow the odd wing mirror to get anywhere.

[awavey]

Ofo leaves the UK. It seems the British are thugs and vandals and can't be trusted. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... -of-london

I get the feeling Urbo (http://myurbo.com/) have quietly gone the same way, as they pulled out of 3 of the London boroughs they had bikes in,then claimed they were refreshing the bikes at another site they had, but havent been heard or seen since the middle of June last year.

[Cours]

Ofo leaves the UK. It seems the British are thugs and vandals and can't be trusted. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... -of-london

I don't know if Ofo suffered so much from vandalism as lack of profits

[Richard Fairhurst]

I’m fairly sure there was also an early hire scheme in the UK which had its entire fleet stolen on the first day, but I can’t find the evidence.

I'm fairly sure that one of the Cambridge bike share schemes (didn't even get as far as hire IIRC) ended up mostly in the river and the initial launch fleet were gone within a day. I've heard a certain group accused of doing that but I don't have any evidence, so I won't repeat the allegation. Some detail of the Green Bike Scheme is mentioned in passing in reports like https://www.camcycle.org.uk/newsletters ... cle18.html

That was during my second year at university there (autumn 1993) and yes, exactly that - they lasted a couple of days and that was it. I remember seeing a couple parked up outside the little market on Trinity Street and no more.

At the Cyclenation conference in Oxford the other year, the operators of the modern dockless schemes were very candid about the economics - they agreed there was only room for one or at most two companies in a city, so they were all flooding the market in the hope they'd be the last one standing. It looks like Ofo blinked first, or at least their financiers did.