JCDecaux's losses from theft are explicitly limited by their contract with Paris, so their sudden change of heart is probably more of a PR move to aid in contract negotiations than a true sign of the viability of bike sharing schemes.<p><a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demise-greatly-exaggerated/" rel="nofollow">http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...</a><p>Maybe one day, the peninsula will have a quality bike sharing network to help solve Caltrain's last mile problem. One day...
The other side of the story: <a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demise-greatly-exaggerated/" rel="nofollow">http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...</a>
One more piece of evidence that it only takes a very small percentage of jerks to screw it up for the rest of us...<p>The same goes for the internet, nowadays if you design anything at all that has an end-user component you'll spend at least as much time at making it jerk-proof and doing all kinds of abuse analysis as you spend on doing features.
This has similarities with the Prisoners' Dilemma:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma</a><p>Although we'd all be better off if we all cooperated, there will always be those who take their personal advantage and screw everyone else.<p>It's too easy to label them as sociopaths, and in some sense they are, but game theory ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory</a> ) predicts this behaviour.<p>It sucks, but you won't change it.<p>This also has consequences for social networks, such as Hacker News. It's OK when everyone shares a common purpose and common interests, but get enough newbies and the culture won't propagate.<p>The various car share schemes that require significant buy-in and have penalties for non-compliance and that shifts the game theory into a configuration that works. Maybe something similar will eventually be required for social networks too.
They should figure out a way where you rent them with a credit card, and if you don't return it and scan your credit card getting credit for returning it, they charge you to replace it.<p>They could still get damaged and returned as such, but at least they couldn't get completely stolen, which is the most valuable thing for criminals to do since that actually gets them money.
Toulouse has a similar scheme... it's not the bikes that seemed to get stolen, it's the shopping baskets on the front that either get unscrewed or simply cut off.