- It's a cool bike, right? Let's steal it. (upbeat music) So even though this isn't my bike, I can legally and easily take it or any of the other 249 just like it roaming around San Francisco.
It's part of a system called Uber Bike, and it's Uber for bikes. Bike-sharing used to be only in ultra-yuppie places like Brooklyn and San Francisco, but it'll likely hit most major U. S.
cities before too long. There are really two different kinds of bike-sharing these days. This one's pretty straightforward.
Companies just set up racks full of bikes all over a city. But these big racks won't fit everywhere, so sometimes you have to walk 10 minutes just to get a bike. The more interesting bike-sharing is dockless.
It's even simpler, you ride until you're done, leave the bike wherever, the end. You use an app to locate and unlock the bike, then pay for time or get an unlimited membership. The Bay area is kind of an impossible city to get around.
You get to choose between public transit, which is probably broken, and traffic, which is probably horrible. Biking's usually the fastest way anywhere, but have you seen the hills? This bike's made by a company called JUMP which is working with Uber on a pilot in San Francisco.
It's actually electric, and with this motor making every pedal way more powerful, it's a really easy ride. It's really great for riding a couple of miles to the train station or popping over to the grocery store. I've found it turns a 30-minute walk into a 12-minute ride, and I'm only paying $2 a half hour.
Uber Bikes actually requires you to lock the bike to a pole or tree or something when you're done, using a U-lock like this one. As long as you've put this in, the bike thinks it's locked and you're not paying any more. But if you stash it somewhere like in your garage or in this bush, it'll be right there where you left it.
This definitely violates the Terms of Service, by the way. The downside of no bike stations is that it's harder to find a bike when you need it. I've walked up to bikes that turned out to be out of service for charging or maintenance or already reserved and I've reserved bikes that I then just couldn't find on the street anywhere.
I've seen a few broken bikes around San Francisco, just totally stripped for parts, and some other cities are having even worse problems. There's a lot for Uber and all these other bike-sharing companies to figure out if they want to keep these bikes charged and available. Still, it's a pretty great ride, fast, easy, and usually ridiculously convenient and, even though the pedals are doing most of the work, I still get to feel like I'm exercising.
