(As of this weekend, I count five companies with bikes on the ground here in Greater Boston: Ant Bikes, LimeBike, ofo, VBikes, and Zagster. One other operator, Spin, has announced they will be bringing bikes here soon as well.)
Note added today: There's quite a lot of underpants gnomes about the business model around dockless bikeshare. In its most irresponsible form, the model goes something like this:
- Have lots of cheap bikes built, rentable with an app
- Dump them all over the place
- ...
- Profit!