1. No money down: a decent bike is $700+, a bike share is $3 per ride or under $100 per year
2. No maintenance: someone else keeps the tires full and the chain lubed. If something breaks, you just park the bike and get another one.
3. No theft: bikes get stolen when they are parked. When a bike share is parked, it’s not your problem.
4. No parking hassles: finding a safe place to park your bike in the city is tough. Many buildings don’t provide bike storage. Try carrying your bike up and down from a 5th floor walk-up every day.
5. One-way trip: you rode to work this morning, and now it’s raining. No problem, take the bus home.
Don’t believe me, just ask New Yorkers, who are taking an average of 40,000 rides per day on the city’s 12,000 citibikes.
1. My current bike cost $550 new, 6 years ago, so that would've been less than $100/yr, if I hadn't replaced parts and spent more. But I get unlimited rides. And it'll last another 20 years if I'm not a fad-follower and don't get reckless or unlucky.
2. I do it myself, that way I'm the one in control of when it fails to get done.
3. Always lock it. Never had a problem. Having a cheap $550 bike probably helps.
4. Yep America's like that. I carry mine up & down from the 3rd floor. If I move I'll choose not to live above the 3rd floor. Or maybe I'll live on the 5th floor after all, and become a bad-ass with huge calves and five flights of endurance.
5. I wear rain gear.
While this is its main use, it's also a great alternative to riding your own bike in cases where you want extra flexiblity - as referred to in point 5 in the list above - not only for changes in weather, but also when you want to travel out and back through some asymmetric combination of biking, walking, public transit, and Uber/Lyft. This flexibility can be very liberating.
It's also a useful temporary backup when your bike is broken.
> 4. Yep America's like that. I carry mine up & down from the 3rd floor. If I move I'll choose not to live above the 3rd floor. Or maybe I'll live on the 5th floor after all, and become a bad-ass with huge calves and five flights of endurance.
As I'm sure you'd recognize, there are many people (e.g. the not-so-fit) and situations (e.g. fancy clothes and dirty bike, or also having other things to carry) for which this isn't practical.
Obvious use cases for bike sharing is when you only need to ride a bike one way (so not a return trip) which happens very often actually (i.e. I sometimes ride a bike to a shopping mall but once I do my shopping I have to carry 2 full bags of groceries and other basic items so there's no way I'm riding a bike back, I'd get a cab).
If you plan on walking somewhere for 20 minutes but once you're there you can take tube from there home as it's close to a tube station, another use case. People who live in apartments and don't have storage place to keep a bike. An so on, use cases are plenty which is evidenced by the fact that millions of people use bike sharing in Asia but also other places on a daily bases.
Seriously though, why rely on the vagaries of supply and demand on somebody's network, and their maintenance diligence and so on, for a thing that you can own so cheaply, and always have there when you need it? It just has never made sense to me.
The exception of course is for tourists who didn't bring their scooters or bikes along. I have considered it in that case... though never actually did it. I just walked.