Dockless Bikes - Regulation Breakdown

Over the past year, the streets of many international cities have been flooded with dockless bikes and that wave is currently hitting the U.S. Unlike current docking systems in the U.S., dockless bikes allow riders to end their rides and park anywhere they like. This paper looks at many positive and negative externalities dockless bikes can bring: offering affordable transit; ability to solve the issue of the last mile; saving cities money and making transportation more equitable by servicing transit deserts, and offering cities rider data with the potential to help city planners implement new bike infrastructure. The negative externalities deal with: bikes blocking public ways, thrown into trees and rivers; stories of companies launching without a proper permit and without notifying city officials; safety issues; reports of lack of maintenance on broken bikes; and problems of inconsistent availability and locations.

Dockless vendors are currently in talks with Chicago transportation officials and are looking to launch this new mode of transportation in the spring of 2018 (Greenfield, 2017). In order to prepare the City of Chicago for dockless bikes, we have compiled a list of American cities and their recent dockless bike permits, regulations, contracts and proposals (please see Regulation Breakdown Chart featured in our report). With this report, we provide unique takeaways from U.S. cities currently experimenting with (or proposing) pilot programs, which we then use to provide guidelines on how the City of Chicago should approach these new dockless bike vendors.