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Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:
"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.
Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.
The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:
Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 08 2018, @07:30AM (2 children)
A better approach could be to partner with one of the companies trying to offer dockless bicycles around the U.S. Google can cut a deal where they pay in the seed money to get the business to infect that area, any of their employees can use a code from their phones to bypass the normal payment method, and then the company (LimeBike, Mobike, Spin, Ofo, etc.) deals with handling and maintaining the bikes. However the dockless bicycle system has been criticized since bikes end up getting parked in places they shouldn't (not so different from this though).
Or Google could fire the contractors and just use that money to buy some more bikes. Although the teams are doing necessary and unavoidable cleanup work if bikes are littering streets and creeks.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 08 2018, @07:32AM
New Electric Bikes, Scooters, and Dockless Bicycles Hitting U.S. Streets [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 08 2018, @03:50PM
Interestingly, our University Campus has a bike sharing program, and we're on the small side for a University.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"