Living in a large city is not the most tranquil and relaxing experience. There’s the traffic, buildings that are sky high, inches apart from one another or built attached. Pedestrians are everywhere and in our own neighborhood of South Boston there is of course what seems to be a detour for a construction site around every corner.
Needless to say, if you drive a car, it’s often no picnic getting from place to place and can more often than not take a half an hour to go a half a mile. It’s safe to say that there are few people on record who say they are fans of bumper to bumper traffic. But most people love their cars, pickups or SUV’s and would never part with them.
Enter that mode of transportation known as the ‘bicycle’. They are compact, light weight, non-polluting and compared to most motor vehicles, relatively inexpensive and apparently, no longer just for the kids anymore. To capitalize on this method of travel, bike sharing companies have set up shop in cities around the country including Boston and, in some cases, do quite well.
For those who like to ride bikes, but prefer not to own one of their own, there are a number of docks where with a credit or debit card, and now a smart phone app, you can rent one for the day or longer. A bike dock consists of several or even many racks where these rental bikes are secured and where you pick up and return the bike. Blue Bikes, formerly called Hubway is said to be the best-known company in the area.
But now there are dockless or ‘stationless’ bike businesses popping up to compete with the more established traditional bike share companies. With these, you can leave the bikes virtually anywhere when finished using them. The company will come and retrieve those using electronic tracking devices and the odds of them being stolen from where they left are reduced to some degree because of the automatic locks that secure them when the rider is done. Among the best known dockless bike companies in the Boston area are said to be ‘Ant Bikes’, ‘Lime Bikes’ and ‘Spin’. We said Boston ‘area’, not Boston, because there may be some controversy about access to the city by these new dockless companies.
But as they are moving more heavily into Boston’s suburbs, it’s been reported in the Boston Globe and other media outlets that not all residents of those areas are happy about it with some people said to be actually deliberately causing damage to the 2 wheeled vehicles perhaps out of anger. Bikes have been found thrown in the ocean in several communities around metro Boston, some have been broken and tossed into trash cans and others just totally destroyed with what seems a vengeance.
Some neighbors have referred to these bikes as “graffiti “, because they are turning up discarded and causing what some residents consider blight on the neighborhood. And even though they not technically be sanctioned to operate in Boston’s city limits they are in fact turning up, discarded in some communities including right here in South Boston.
Bike sharing is perhaps here to stay, particularly in the city, as bicycle riding enthusiasts and those preferring this less expensive, more maneuverable method to get around are also advocates for it. Others however, including many motorists, find them to be a nuisance and do not appreciate having to share Boston’s already overcrowded streets with them, because they feel they add an extra degree of danger to not only those driving cars but also to the bicyclists themselves and even pedestrians. It can cause tension at times.
But, it is the dockless bikes, because they are being discarded in so many areas that seem to be the bigger issue currently. Will all sides of the issue learn to coexist on the cluttered streets of Boston and surrounding areas? Perhaps not but that’s anyone’s guess. But for now, at least at times, the jockeying for position on the hard top continues to be a topic of contention.
