Had the opportunity to try out Bike Share's Islands Pilot yesterday...
I think a fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is:
what is the purpose of Bikeshare on the Islands? On the mainland its purpose is commuting. One person, one direction, pick up and drop off.
On the Islands....the purpose is leisure, and so the trips are going to be different. In my experience yesterday, the people renting Bikeshares are not people who normally use them for commuting, and are people coming in from further-flung suburbs who view the Bikeshares more like the two-or-four seat rentals already on the island, where they rent them and hold onto them regardless of what they're doing on the island. And it was common for these groups to be four, five, or six people large.
Yesterday's experience was, well, not great. The valets at the stations didn't do anything to support customers. I waited 25+ minutes for a bike at Centre Island as there was no line and no order, and so any person who was bringing a bike back was flocked by half a dozen people waiting for one. Groups would hold onto bikes at the station and not pull them out until they had their required number, and so stations may show "six bikes available" but they were already spoken for with people waiting to take them out. People would return a bike to a station and then immediately take it out again to continue using it.
My partner and I waited to grab our bikes from Centre Island in order to bike them to Hanlan's, which we eventually did, forgetting our usual mantra of
avoid Centre Island as much as possible. The group of six people who got their bikes ahead of us had similar plans, but instead of returning their bikes to Hanlan's dock to eat their meal like we did upon arrival, they held onto them at their picnic table. They were not the only group of five+ people who were holding onto their bikes as they picnic'd within eyeshot of a dock, and that speaks to the fundamental issue of yesterday's experience: lack of bikes and a lack of general etiquette surrounding shared bike services.
The Hanlan's dock at Mermaid Cafe was barren most of our time there. When we brought our bikes a father and son were very happy to see us, saying they had been waiting 20+ minutes for available bikes. The only dock I saw that had plenty of available bikes was Hanlan's ferry dock, where I guess the people travelling to-from that area know that the beach isn't far enough away to make a bike really worth the hassle.
I guess the main resolution would be to add more bikes to the Island network, but that's not going to change the overall habits of what kind of people are renting out bikeshares and for what purpose they are renting them out.
