Sean Healy was driving for Uber in Seattle when a passenger offered him an intriguing job. It wasn't the first time a rider had proposed a new line of work; in the bustling tech scene in Seattle, his passengers often seemed to be scouting for people to hire. But last summer, the person in the backseat of his family’s minivan was the general manager of a company called Ofo.

The man pitched Healy on a new gig-economy job transporting bikes around the city. The work itself sounded just so-so, but the man painted it as something bigger—a vision of a new kind of city, with fewer cars clogging the landscape and a metropolis made safe for people on two wheels. Kind of like Europe. "He seemed like a decent guy," says Healy, 33. "He wanted to do things that were not just environmentally sustainable but ethically sustainable."

Ofo's business is dockless bike sharing, and it was about to launch its US operations in Seattle. Dockless bike share is just the latest of a dozen new approaches to urban mobility in increasingly congested cities. Ride-hailing services, app-powered carpools, on-demand car rentals, electric bikes, scooters, and even self-driving taxis are all jockeying for riders on the streets of American cities. Together they are reinventing the way we navigate urban environments, reducing private car usage, improving traffic and commute times, and cutting emissions.

But where alternatives to car ownership are well-established in the US's major metropolises, bike shares are still finding their niche. Paris, London, and New York have all adopted bike share programs that use docks, bulky stations that are built into parking spaces that dictate where the bikes' users must start and end rides. Though they cost a fraction of a more traditional, multibillion-dollar transit project, the stations are still expensive to install and maintain, and their fixed locations limit the number of riders they can attract.

What makes a dockless bike share program appealing is that, beyond the bikes themselves, it doesn't need any infrastructure. With nothing to build, a city can introduce a new way of getting around virtually overnight. A smartphone app tells users where cheap, GPS-enabled bikes are located and lets them rent one. Upon arriving at a destination, a rider simply leaves the self-locking bike there for the next user. Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and several small Florida cities, among other places, have all embraced small dockless bike share programs.

Seattle could use a transportation reboot. The home of a thriving tech sector, Seattle is a fast-growing city and home to some of the country's worst traffic. Last year, when it decided to give dockless bikes a chance, it didn't have a bike share program of any kind. Success here could set up dockless bike share for a nationwide roll-out. Failure could mean more cars, more fumes, and more traffic jams for all. But what looked on the surface like an easy win ended up revealing the limits of a startup-led revolution. As Seattle residents discovered, just because the city could get bikes on the streets with little investment didn't mean it should.

When dockless bike share began in Chinese cities three years ago, the downsides of the idea soon became apparent. Tens of thousands of broken or stranded bikes littered those cities before their governments cracked down, impounding bikes and setting limits on their use. Seattle's Department of Transportation wanted to avoid that mess.





1 / 9 Chevron Chevron Jenny Riffle

So last July, the city allowed three companies—Ofo, LimeBike, and Spin—to deploy up to 4,000 bikes each in a six-month trial, in return for a deluge of data about their customers and operations. Seattle planners wanted to understand in granular detail how the systems would work, and how its citizens would use them. Now the data is in, much of it sourced by WIRED through a series of public records requests.