I'm an AVID cyclist, and though bike shares may work in other areas or countries, there is simply no point in extending the program if the numbers are correct, and i don't doubt they are. Bike ridership continues to grow, aside from this program, so any monies earmarked for this program should be spent on the planned bike infrastructure improvements.
It was good to give it a shot and really see the results, but obviously it's not a good fit in MV. That is bad for the people who run the bike share company, but good news for cyclists in general in MV.

I find it easier to use a car.

I could have told you this wasn't going to work. It was a stupid idea from the beginning!

The city should have known from the beginning that a system with so few bike share stations was doomed to fail. The system was really useless for residents trying to get around town.

Just as in Palo Alto, these bike share programs are not working because they do not suit the need of residents or of those arriving in town by public transport. I read recently of one system in the Bay area where the bikes can be left at any bike rack not a designated rack.

If there was a place to rent them near where I live, I may ride them to the Caltrain station, but they are not where I live. If they were near the high schools, the students might ride them to school and not have to worry about bikes being stolen, flat tires, or other maintenance issues.

These are not working because there is no real reason for anyone to use them. Unless someone arriving at a station and can drop them off where they have to end their journey, then they are useless.

Good. Very good in fact. Now there is more money and focus for real bike programs. The numbers of riders keeps growing so it's good future discussions won't be cluttered with these silly blue bikes.

Zero thought or planning went in to the locations of the kiosks. Who exactly is the fleet of bikes at the El Camino end of Castro meant for?

Bike commuting is something I wish I could personally take advantage of-- it's an important niche (though only a niche). The failure of a poorly designed program shouldn't be a reflection on the whole concept

I'm an avid cyclist and have used bike share programs in other states and countries.
I feel for a bike share program to be successful, there needs to be a significant number of docking stations near common start points and end points. The program isn't user friendly if the user has to walk more than a few blocks to get/park the bike.

I think the Google bike "program" is a good one for comparison, and yes I know Google bikes are for employees, but bear with me.
In the area, there are so many bikes available anywhere you look in the area, people use them all the time. The fact that they are free must also not be overlooked.
The problem is that expanding such a program over a broad area would be financially prohibitive.

I have used City Bike Share since it's inception to commute from the San Francisco 4th and King station to my office in San Francisco. It's perfect for this. As has bee noted in many of the comments, the MV version was destined to fail because there are so few stations. This system is intended to be used for getting around town or to/from public transportation. With only 9 stations in MV and nearly all of them near public transportation, the other end of the system, in residential areas, does not exist. If stations were extended West of El Camino and East of Central Expwy to enable one-way trips to/from downtown and public transportation, there would be a possibility of success. You need a network to get the network effect!

The Google bike program is not a fair comparison as Google spend a lot of $$ on replacing stolen or broken bikes every month.

Like all public transportation in any sprawling area (e.g. Bay Area), public bikes are a last mile problem. But if they can't take you door to door, then in most cases it will be faster to use other methods. I can see this working in a city like SF, but not here.

I believe one other problem with them is that people are tired of getting nickeled and dimed for everything. Like the example of the bike station at the ECR end of Castro, this could be for people who get off the train and want to bike from one end of Castro to the other. But who is going to pay $9/day for that privilege? I think a cost per hour or cost per mile structure would make more sense than a flat rate, IMHO.

Agree with comments above.
I used bike share regularly when I lived in London. It is a BRILLIANT system.

I took time to lobby the Bike Share folks here to put a station by the hospital so I could ride to Caltrain, but they were unmoved. Makes ZERO sense to only have bike stations along the train corridor. Put stations at hospital, high school, miramonte shopping, loyola corner, etc and people can get to/from the residential areas and downtown/train. I would have used many times to/from Waverly but ended up taking Uber instead.

Imagine how much more bang for the buck the city could get if they spent $100k on some bike repair events and better bike racks at the train station. Give out vouchers for discount train tickets, etc. I mean, really, most people who are going to consider using a bike as a 'last mile' solution PROBABLY own a bike. Or could pick up a cheap one

Check out Denver's B-Cycle system website. Then note the other cities with a B-Cycle operation. Many more stations in each city is the key advantage of this system. Note that the prices you pay are the same without the many stations that B-Cycle has.

Web Link

Personal Bike----RTD Light Rail Station Bike locker-----Downtown B-Cycle------Work Near/At B-Cycle Station.

Maybe Mountain View has been dealing with the wrong people.

It doesn't take much time to walk the length of downtown. The east side of 101 is served by light rail. Who was expected to rent a bike? It seems like this program was more of a display of action than a thoughtful alternative transportation effort.

This implementation took a great idea and redesigned it for failure. By comparison, the system in Vienna has a 1€ registration fee, the first hour is free and the second hour is another 1€. The Mountain View registration fee is absurdly high and the hourly rates are absurdly high. I understand that it's expensive to maintain this fleet but this is supposed to be a subsidized social good to facilitate mass transit, not a profit-making venture. Beyond that, the Mountain View system goes from nowhere to nowhere. The cynic in me believes that no one ever believed in this system; it was just a way to waste and pocket some grant money. That's a shame; I love the bike share systems in European cities like Paris.

Followup note: The comment system doesn't handle unicode characters gracefully. That's one euro for registration, one euro for the second hour of bike rental in Vienna.

I believe user density is too low for most of the city. A bike share in SF can serve 10x the riders. One bike sharer becomes ten, enough for a station to be viable.

I agree with previous comments that the money could be very well spent improving biking for bike owners. Better lanes (protected where possible), more bike parking, a few repair stations would be great. Make biking safer and more visible to get people to think that biking is a possibility.

More stations would be nice, if only to remove further objections by people who have no intention of using the bikes anyways. Which reveals the more fundamental point: there are far too few people here that actually want to, or have reason to, ride a bike to work, or to downtown, etc. Most people would rather jump in a car and drive themselves even a mile. That's a shame, but that's a fact, and until we stop treating the needs of such people as the top priority in traffic engineering, it's not going to change.

you must have missed all the bike route improvement stories

I'm not sure you understood the words that I used.

^^^^^There is always one^^^^^

This is a stupid program. It should be designed for people who don't own bikes, like workers who want to get somewhere, not residents who likely already own a bike. The fact that it fails with private management should tell you something. Like it wont work . So public management will just suck tax dollars away from more useful spending.