Bike Share in Waterloo Region

[plam]

Hasn't been any news that I've heard, but unless something has changed, a launch should be imminent--within the next few weeks.

Since this is a thread about bike share, I thought I might mention my experience in Seattle this spring. They have a number of competing dockless bikeshare stations now. At first I thought it was weird to see these bikes in random places (though you're not supposed to leave them in the way). But they are quite useful for going places where there aren't docks---I've had dock anxiety in Toronto, hoping that there'd be a station near my destination.

I used both LimeBike and ofo. I started with LimeBike and got some free credits, but then they wanted me to buy $20 of credits, which doesn't really make sense when I'm there for 2 days, so I signed up with ofo and got more free credits. It's like $1/hour for both of these, or maybe a bit more for an ebike. Some of the LimeBike bikes had mechanical problems which I reported. They generally were standard bikeshare bikes (ie somewhat slow and heavy), and the apps worked well enough.

Seattle also has helmet laws for bicyclists and a surprisingly high number of bicycles for a place with helmet laws, although traffic is really bad, so that probably helps. Most people on their own bikes have helmets, but I read that bikeshare users tend to not have helmets (because, well, you might not be carrying around a helmet).