Are they like unrentable because they're up in trees or down in Lake Union?

@HW3 Nah, they're unrentable because they've got poor-people germs on them.

You'd think the bootstrapped mad-skillz demographic would be immune, but a lot of them behave as if they're especially vulnerable.

"SDOT has reprimanded Lime by docking the total number of bikes the company is allowed in the city by 500."

What? When only one outta three work? They need three times as many, it would seem.

Lime is purposely sabotaging its bike share so they can implement scooters instead.

I was disappointed when Lime shifted their bike fleet from standard-pedal bikes and battery-powered bikes... to battery-powered only.

Now it looks like that was a bad business decisions too, with all their eggs in one battery-basket, they became vulnerable.

The scooters are doomed.

Still, I'll never ride Uber's "Jump" bikes. Besides the absolutely garish color, Uber's profit model based on abusing citizen drivers and punishing cabbies alike is vulgar capitalism at its most insidious. And they turn around & spend their profits on "self-driving" vehicles which will eliminate all their human drivers as soon as they can manage it. If you drive for Uber, you are driving to your own career-grave, foolish monkey.

@7 I wouldn't worry too much about Uber. In addition to regulatory evasion, their continuing operations depend on massive and continuous subsidies in the form of new cash from investors. Their ongoing losses are enormous, and barring a miraculous breakthrough in self-driving vehicle safety, the only way they're going to be able to stay in business is to raise prices to reflect the true costs of the services they're selling.

So it turns out that roughly half (nearly 2/3s for Lime) the bikeshare bikes lying around on the ground truly are nonfunctioning objects someone privately owns but they're being stored, uselessly, in public spaces? Isn't this one of the primary objections to dockless bikeshare? Does anyone even care? I'm curious if these mobility share companies get held to any standards for anything up here, ever.

@4,

Huh? I read the post twice and didn't see anything about safety/crashes/helmets addressed. Forcing the companies to provide helmet bins would do little more than to decrease ridership and increasing clutter and lice.

It's rare that I come across a Lime bike in decent working condition. Dead batteries, missing batteries, misaligned handlebars, wobbly wheels, cut brakes. I rarely even try to rent them anymore.

@8 - Ah, good to know. I wasn't following their machinations too closely after those first couple years of disgust. Probably for the best though,.. my one-man, revolutionary(TM) boycott of Uber hasn't brought them to their knees yet. So maybe they'll do themselves in as you say.

At least Yellow Cab now has an app you can use to call them, which generally works most of the time.

@6 is completely right. I gave up on the Lime bikes as soon as I realized the Uber bikes were cheaper and more well-maintained, and that Uber might actually give a shit, which Lime clearly doesn’t.

I can't see any way these companies are coming close to making money. Let's do some quick math. Looks like there will be approx 2 million rides in Seattle this year across approx 9,000 bikes. Sounds like a lot but when you break it down, that's only 222 rides per bike per year and less than one ride per day. These e-bikes are expensive and there is quite a large operation behind the scenes relocating bikes, standing them up, replacing charge packs, and repairing the damaged/vandalized ones. Seems like Lime has made the call to not throw good money after bad here and is hoping scooters are the new shiny object they can push to stay relevant while the bike share runs its course. It's a bummer, I like the service, and have been rooting for it to work, but i don't think we'll see these bikes around in two years.

I'm still trying to figure out when the City of Seattle decided that a for-profit business has superior rights to sidewalk space over pedestrians, for whose benefit the sidewalks were ostensibly created. There are place downtown where a mobility scooter simply cannot pass due to the litter of bikes.

Sounds like they are letting their fleet wear out. The Jump bikes are much newer so it makes sense they work more often. A predictive sign of them either desperately trying to cut costs (maintenance) or of them preparing to simply close shop entirely.