Guess the CEO of this company won' t be getting a bonus this year
- Thread starter Fordulike
- Start date
I can see Mobike failing in the same way in many locations. Even the docking based systems in Paris and London have cost far more than expected and have had to be bailed out with huge sums of public money.
I'm still convinced that no bike hire system can work at an acceptable cost, the public simply cannot be trusted enough to care for the bikes or even to reliably return them.
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I'm still convinced that no bike hire system can work at an acceptable cost, the public simply cannot be trusted enough to care for the bikes or even to reliably return them.
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.. surprising it has been a great success in Dublin, . I would also have been sceptical, and expected to see the canal filled with them but no.... In the Dublin case they are sponsored by coco cola as advertising , so they are not intended as a profit centre.
That the central part of Dublin is very flat, and the bikes are good quality, and very different looking from ordinary bikes and the first half hour is free, means that people use them for a journey and then lock them up.
You need to have a credit card to access the service and this limits abuse. ... We would have fewer credit card sources than larger economies.
London has the free first half hour too, and that spelt problems, since it upset the budgeting. The scheme had been forecast to have enough charged income together with the sponsorship to cover the costs.
In practice virtually everyone confines their use to the free half hour so there's virtually no usage income. In addition the first sponsor, Barclays, weren't happy with the advertsing value, so first reduced what they paid and later dropped out completely. They're now with Santander who are pretty astute so are unlikely to be paying more than Barclays ended up paying.
The Paris Velib scheme which lead the way was a disaster, in no time half the bikes were either missing or broken down. It ended up costing so much that the operator, experienced company J C Decaux, said it would pull out if not given far more money, so that had to be fiddled from the Paris budget somehow. It also suffered from bikes being left at the foot of Paris' steep hills, resulting in having to buy some vans and hire crews to pick them up all the time to take them to where needed.
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