Just imagine a sliding-doors American bikeshare landscape where Lyft didn't break up Motivate, and Uber didn't gut and dump Jump.
The Lyft/Motivate/ex-PBSC platform will live on, regardless of whatever Lyft does. But what a short-term shitshow it could be for DC, Boston, and NYC.
Fuck the TNCs.
@DemonHusky Nonprofit operating system would be incredible, and would open up so much flexibility in choosing operations companies.
Transit integration depends on transit payment systems talking to literally anything else, and are often provided by a single devoted walled-garden vendor
@bikepedantic If there was a large non-profit bikeshare operator that created a standard payment interface and cities started asking for the ability to link, you might get some of the transit payment vendors to at least talk to the bikeshare people. Maybe I'm being too hopeful here though
@bikepedantic Their customer service has been god-awful for a while now. Had a bike that refused to dock a few months ago and the support line was like talking to a brick wall. They simply have no procedure in place for when their real-world hardware fails. The bike is still out (sitting in my basement), the timer is still going on the app, they have no way to schedule a pickup, and support has gone unresponsive.
@bikepedantic All this outsourcing of bike share to big companies is ridiculous. Transit authorities should operate them. Look at Bewegen’s bankruptcy and how it just suddenly stopped operating all of its contracts for bike shares around the world.
@bikepedantic Build a non-profit national operator (consolidate software development/management) and have the cities own their hardware (like Boston).
Make transit integration better (at the least, like rides count as a transfer, to allow/encourage multimodal trips), and also make it so you can use the same app (if not also the same subscription) when you travel between cities to start a ride.