THE WOODLANDS BEATS HOUSTON TO ITS DOCKLESS BIKESHARING FUTURE 
While Houston’s city council debates proposed new regulations that might allow as many as 6 competing companies to let loose as many as 3,500 new leave-’em-anywhere shared bicycles each across the city over the course of a year, The Woodlands has decided to go ahead with its own smaller kiosk-free program — with a single vendor. Mobike, a 2-year-old Chinese company now ranked as the largest bike-sharing organization in the world, will begin unleashing 50 to 100 bicycles, mostly intended to be used around The Woodlands Town Center. The company has operated in Washington DC since September. The Woodlands Township entered into the agreement with Mobike after a pilot program approved in October with Houston docked-bike vendor B-Cycle stalled. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Mobike
Sign up for the Newsletter
I am all about the bike sharing thing, but these leave them anywhere services are weird. They have them in Dallas and the bikes are strewn all over the Katy Trail in the morning as people leave them after a night on the town. It gives the area an Invasion of the Body Snatchers look.
I was just reading on Facebook earlier a comment from a friend in Dallas about their kiosk free bike program. Apparently it’s a gigantic cluster and people just leave the bikes lying around everywhere and in the way of good God-fearing cyclists and pedestrians and not in any sort of orderly fashion.
people go back to being at toddler stage when told they can leave stuff anywhere…and the result is exagerrated with all that pentup.
I used these on vacation in DC. Pretty convenient to just chuck them on the sidewalk right in front of your destination rather than finding a dock station.
These as well as limebike, spin, and others are in the DC area right now and I love them.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-share-graveyard-a-monument-to-industrys-arrogance
The Woodlands is probably the most bikeable place in the Houston area because of the profusion of trails and proximity of homes to retail/restaurants/offices. However, there seems to be very few of us that think that bikes are useful for anything other than 1) kids and 2) 100-mile rides on $10,000 bikes while wearing spandex. I’m bewildered when I pull into the grocery store (on my bike) and see others getting out of their cars, to go into a store and pay money to ride a bike that doesn’t go anywhere, then get in their car and drive back home. I will be curious to see how this works out.