Uber Bike – A New Way to Commute or Explore

There&#x27;s a lot of room for improvement over the new wave of bike startups.<p>I had shockingly bad experiences with OBike - extremely inaccurate locations for their bikes, broken seat, zero response from support when I explained I couldn&#x27;t lock the bike, and apparently no restrictions in the whole country, so bikes end up all over the country as well as in people&#x27;s residences or workplaces (not to mention canals and rivers). They dumped hundreds of bikes in central London and a couple weeks later there were none at all.<p>Mobike seems like they have their heads more switched on, but the seat on current models is so low that their bikes (in London at least) are barely usable to anyone at average adult height or above.<p>The official London scheme aka Boris Bikes is still the best, but restricted to central London. The docks have three downsides over the newer model - (1) docks can get full and (2) you still have the last-mile problem walking to&#x2F;from the dock (3) if unfamiliar with your destination, your ride ends hunting around for a dock to park in or you have to plan ahead and remember where to park ... even then it might be full.<p>One good thing though is they apparently move bikes around in vans to help fill capacity (mainly because commuters move them central in the morning and away again at night). I don&#x27;t think the new wave of bike startups expanding to new cities every week are hiring drivers to move their stock around.

I rode a Jump bike to work today. It&#x27;s a magical experience.<p>Just as I struggle a bit to get up a hill, the bike&#x27;s pedal assist kicks in and helps me out. Ditto for when I&#x27;m stopped at a red light and need to get riding fast.<p>The best part of these bikes are the fact that when I get to my destination, I can lock them up to the closest pole or bike rack and just go.

Opinion: Bike sharing will never be more than barely above break even.<p>I am a big bike advocate. I have 12 bikes downstairs, I&#x27;ve raced, and nearly every vacation I&#x27;ve taken in the last 15 years has been bike related. I don&#x27;t even mind the e-bike trend as much as some people, and I am an uber user occasionally.<p>I still can&#x27;t see this working. People like me, who absolutely love bike commuting, we can&#x27;t stop our bikes from getting stolen. With our 100 dollar locks that are better security than what most people use on the front door of their homes, they still get stolen. I have hope for humanity in general, but my experience has been that people in America just don&#x27;t consider a bicycle worth any more than paper and ink in the office printer.<p>They will get treated with disregard, and even more so with an uber logo on them.

First of all, this is great. The thing that bike share programs lack IMO is the tech and logistics savvy of a company like uber.<p>In Santa Monica and the west side of LA we have an electric scooter service called Bird, which was started by a ex-lyft&#x2F;uber excec, and it has been successfull from an outsider&#x27;s perspective. The most convenient aspect of this service is that you can drop off the scooter anywhere you want, there are no designated drop off zones, which is a true solution to the last mile problem. Main issues they need to resolve from a user stand point is better inventory allocation (hard to find a pair of or multiple scooters near each other for multiple riders to travel together).

For everyone else who&#x27;s getting a 404: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HTfZh" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HTfZh</a><p>I hope they don&#x27;t handle bikes like their do their websites...

How do people who&#x27;ve used it feel about the dockless iteration of bike sharing?<p>I&#x27;ve never had occasion to try it, but I&#x27;m very skeptical. It seems like letting people leave the bike more-or-less wherever is optimizing the end-of-ride experience at the expense of pretty much every other part of the operation aside from actually riding the bike.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d want to start my morning commute by hunting around in an app for a nearby bike (and hoping there is one) and then wandering around my neighborhood trying to locate it. I&#x27;d much rather have the consistency of walking to a known location near my house and grabbing a bike that I know will be there.<p>I also don&#x27;t know that, as someone who has to use the sidewalks when not riding, I&#x27;d want to have these things just scattered all over the place. Which I fear would be the case. When people are parking these things, it&#x27;s not _their_ bike, so they won&#x27;t be so worried about doing a good job of it.<p>Last, having the bikes scattered at random has got to really do a number on the logistics costs. Going to a relatively constrained list of known locations to retrieve bikes that are due for maintenance sounds a lot cheaper to me than having to drive all over the city, possibly including going to places where the van can&#x27;t go like random spots in the middle of public parks.

I love the idea of integrating the lock so that it needs to be attached to an existing bike rack. Lime bike and Ofo have infiltrated Dallas, and their bikes are somewhat of an eyesore, especially as they are strewn everywhere.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how they enforce the location requirement. i.e. will you be charged if it&#x27;s stolen because you didnt lock it on a rack? Will they have a known database of every &quot;suitable&quot; bike rack and &quot;nudge&quot; patrons towards them if they lock outside those regions?

Maybe I&#x27;m missing something obvious, but how does an electric bike that can be locked anywhere get charged? Do they have people going around replacing the batteries when they get low? How long does a battery last anyway?<p>Edit: solar panel judging off pictures of the Jump bikes?

I find the wave of bike shares a little odd, overall. Access to a bike seems to be the least obstacle when considering commuting by bike - you could probably buy a bike for less than the cost of renting one for a few months. Larger concerns include riding in traffic, being struck by cars, and poor weather. None of those are addressed by plonking a few bikes here and there.

Abusing public bike racks to hold private rental inventory.<p>The best bike shares build and operate their own racks with permission from the city. Others allow leaving the bike in any location. It figures Uber would attempt to get the benefits of a rack without paying for it.

Does the price point of $2 for 30 minutes seem a little high to anyone? Ofo is 4x cheaper at $1&#x2F;hour [1] in Seattle... even when taking into account the high COL in SF and the extra benefit of electric bike, this seems excessive. A uber pool with the express option can be $3-4 for a short bikeable ride, I think I&#x27;d rather default to that in a majority of cases.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seattle.curbed.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;8&#x2F;15&#x2F;16153622&#x2F;ofo-bike-share-launch-seattle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seattle.curbed.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;8&#x2F;15&#x2F;16153622&#x2F;ofo-bike-share...</a>

I would use this. I&#x27;m just concerned how they will deal with all the homeless people and thieves stealing the body parts.<p>On that note, if this can succeed in SF it can succeed anywhere else. I once left my bike in Tenderloin overnight (Of course I had the common sense to use the U-lock) and the next morning I went back and found only the remains.

Interesting. In Seattle we now have 3 dockless bike shares (Spin, Lime and Ofo). I think Lime is about to roll out electric bikes, but so far none are. It makes riding up hills pretty rough, especially since they aren&#x27;t geared very well.

Page seems to have been moved:<p>&quot;Sorry, we couldn’t find that page We’ve moved a lot of stuff over the years, and it must’ve gotten lost in the mix. Please try retyping the address or just head back to our home page.&quot;<p>This is the best link I could find with a quick search: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpbikes.com&#x2F;uber-bike" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpbikes.com&#x2F;uber-bike</a>

Hey Uber - your redirect rules really confuse here - it 404&#x27;s. Maybe instead have it go to a page that simply says &quot;not available in your country&quot; or go to the American page but have an overlay asking if I want to go to a Canadian page or something - the current way just leads to bad user experience.

A lot of metropolitan cities already have bike-to-rent programs e.g. CitiBike in NYC, GoBike in SF. This looks like a quickly and sloppily put together plan to hush noisy investors and shareholders. But hey it is never a bad idea to have more bikes in SF. Especially innovative electric-assist ones.

I haven&#x27;t seen anyone mentioned this nor on that page (sorry if I missed it), but I think the biking sharing is a perfect complimentary step to solve the last mile problem in mass transit system &#x2F; ride sharing programs.<p>Bikes (or E-Bikes in this Uber&#x2F;JUMP case) are zero-mission transportation tools perfect for last mile extension from point A to point B in metropolitans where mass transit system won&#x27;t reach and&#x2F;or can&#x27;t reach. Same apply to car sharing programs as there are some small alleys or hilly&#x2F;twisty roads or pedestrian walkways (maybe this is a stretch) etc.<p>If you have travel to big cities in South East Asia or Mediterranean you would think it makes sense. They use a lot of mopeds but bikes&#x2F;ebikes are better because they burn fat rather than fossil fuel:)

I rode a similar built in Poland (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wavelo.pl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wavelo.pl&#x2F;</a>). And it was a very comfortable one.<p>Actually, the jump ones look very similar. Maybe they are manufactured by the same company?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;ride&#x2F;uber-bike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;ride&#x2F;uber-bike&#x2F;</a> -- doesnt load anymore.

In case it&#x27;s not otherwise posted, this is the first thing that comes to mind when you say &#x27;bike sharing startup&#x27;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fm.cnbc.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;cnbc.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;img&#x2F;editorial&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;104406935-GettyImages-668015360_2.1910x1000.jpg?v=1492421816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fm.cnbc.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;cnbc.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;img&#x2F;edit...</a>

Looks like a lot of you can&#x27;t access the site. You don&#x27;t need Uber for this.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the JUMP iOS app. It&#x27;s well-made and is available right now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;jump-bikes-bike-share&#x2F;id1251322970?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;jump-bikes-bike-share&#x2F;id1251...</a>

I love using the Boris Bikes in London for the first time a couple of weeks back - nice big sturdy things, but oh my word the system is shakey. The app crashed a lot, then the terminals at the bike parks were &quot;disconnected&quot; and couldn&#x27;t process a hire. But is there much room for competition in bike hire? Surely these things need massive city subsidies?

This can be great if they start putting bike racks within hotel properties, which would be great for them too as there is a) easy access to people that do not have vehicles, and b) hotel properties use to be &quot;reasonably&quot; safe for parking.<p>In any case as someone mentions here, it can canibalize its own business we hotel residents tend to use Uber-like services a lot.

Rio de Janeiro had an awesome bike system in 2012. You could use an app to unlock the bikes, find hubs, save your credit card info on the app, super easy to use the bikes. This was all setup and subsidized by a local bank, surprised more cities haven&#x27;t been able to replicate this kind of system.

In Vietnam, they have Uber Moto, where it&#x27;s like normal Uber but they use a motorbike. It was definitely a surprise when I found out, but it makes sense, since motorbikes are the standard form of transport there.<p>I wonder what other interesting regional options Uber has.

Observing these services connect in my own life has been interesting. The peak moment where I really started to think about it was when I took an Uber to pick up my Turo car then drove my Airbnb where I waited for my Instacart order to arrive.

Am I daft or does it only tell you it&#x27;s for SF only when you click sign up? I mean, I figured it was SF only but it&#x27;s kind of annoying that I can&#x27;t really confirm that in any explicit way based on the landing page.

There is something called Peddle by Zoomcar in India and it is amazing.

Nice to see Uber getting into the same &quot;using public infrastructure instead of building our own&quot; scam that all these lousy private bike-sharing companies are doing. Awful company.

Sounds like Donkey Republic which I used (and enjoyed) in Denmark. Nice that you can find&#x2F;return a bike anywhere (not just in a designated rack). Looking forward to doing this in the states

Be prepared for a ton of bikes swimming around in the bay :D<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=j5e-fhUCxmk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=j5e-fhUCxmk</a>

I wonder how much this ends up cannibalizing their existing business (imagining it would be a small fraction) vs attracting new customers away from walking and public transit.

I think uber has a strategic problem in that they want to do everything, everywhen, all the time. ... How about a bit of focus?

Everyone of these I’ve come upon has been dead. I’m if that says anything about just thought I’d contribute my two pence

Cool to see ebikes getting pushed in the USA.

This looks substantially better than Hubway (the Boston bike share). Currently you need to bring bikes from one dock to another dock, and as you would expect commuting completely breaks this model. All the bikes move towards employment centers, meaning docks get saturated and there is nowhere to park near offices, and it&#x27;s also impossible to find a bike anywhere in outlying areas. This pattern reverses during the evening.

Isn&#x27;t it a bit weird to have the waitlist form for such a large company be hosted by a third-party (Typeform)?

Really these would be good for those that use public transportation to get to their final destination. .

How is this furthering Uber&#x27;s agenda and position as a company?

Copy from China?

hitting that page from europe just shows<p>&quot;Sorry, we couldn’t find that page<p>We’ve moved a lot of stuff over the years, and it must’ve gotten lost in the mix. Please try retyping the address or just head back to our home page.&quot;

Great news, the jump app is crap and won&#x27;t even show me where the bikes are before charging me

I will never use this service and think Uber is a negative for society. It&#x27;s unfortunate that people don&#x27;t see it.

It&#x27;s fair to say that the theory &quot;everything evolves to go back to genesis&quot; is correct. Next thing is Airbnb promoting caves and tinder releasing match with your hunter app. Somewhere in the middle Google will come with Fire App.

1) it is showing pictures of a human riding a bicycle with a helmet. Please don&#x27;t promote helmets on bikes: they <i>reduce</i> safety (for people 12+ yo). 2) I get a 404 (NL) 3) JUMP is not linked - I don&#x27;t know what it is untill I reach the bottom of the page. 4) Although it is mentioned on the page, it is not very clear this is SF only.