I counted 77 parked rental bikes on the walk to the office Tuesday morning — a one-minute, two-block trek from the Scottish Rite parking lot to the new News digs on Commerce Street. The bikes, either Ofo's bright yellow offerings or LimeBike's yellow-and-green machines, were clustered on every corner and lined up along the sidewalks in the path of pedestrians. A few stood upright, but dozens were slumped over like New Year's Eve drunks.

The four companies that dumped thousands of dockless bikes on Dallas beginning this fall are supposed to straighten up their act, per instructions from a City Hall that's months away from cracking down on the buck-a-bike rentals to which it had given free rein. But on this dreary Tuesday morning, in front of our office, that job fell to Daniel Lott, a 52-year-old machinist who this time last year was sleeping in Tent City before he sobered up.

He was waiting for a bus when I saw him standing in the morning's downpour picking up a row of fallen LimeBikes. I motioned down the sidewalk, toward another long row of fallen bikes in front of the Statler, and asked why he was even bothering.

"Because this is my city," he said. "And it looks terrible." Hero.

In four months, Dallas has gone from begging for bike share to drowning in rentals. Bikes ditched and destroyed everywhere. Along the Katy Trail. In White Rock Lake. In a tree beside Lemmon Avenue. I found one a couple of weeks ago tossed behind an abandoned South Dallas house. Our photographer Rose Baca, who's spent the last couple of months documenting the out-of-nowhere bike blight, found a LimeBike beside Stemmons Freeway that "just looked like a tangled knot."

Daniel Lott was picking up bikes in downtown Dallas on Tuesday. Because, he said, it was an eyesore. (Robert Wilonsky / Staff writer)

I asked LimeBike how much that bike cost. The company wouldn't say. But Ofo says its bikes, equipped with GPS devices that let the company keep track of its bikes (and an eye on the riders), cost "about a couple hundred dollars" to manufacture.

Just a few months ago city officials were giddy at the prospect of getting bike share for free. They said it would work itself out and thought there'd be one, maybe two companies left standing after the free-for-all. (The Economist recently noted that the bike-share giants, funded with billions in venture-capitalist cash, aren't turning a profit.) With good reason, city officials touted the long-term benefits — affordable transportation for those without cars or easy access to DART, let's say — over what they hoped would be temporary clutter. And they vowed to get the companies to clean up their mess, going so far as to host a meeting between a ticked-off Friends of the Katy Trail and reps from Spin, LimeBike, Ofo and VBikes. Two weeks later, city officials say — based on chats with Friends and calls to 311 — nothing's changed.

I've seen the recent uptick in complaints coming in to 311 and council offices. Ones that say "It's like a yellow bike graveyard" and "This needs to stop; otherwise I will start picking them up and taking them to the police station."

The city's patience has worn thin. So, early in the New Year, the City Council will be presented with a list of proposed regulations that City Hall had hoped to avoid.

Among the likely rules: charging companies for using the public's right of way, forcing the companies to put bikes in South Dallas and other transit-starved parts of the city and — most important — limiting the number of bikes they can dump. One proposal would mirror Seattle's rule that limits bike-share to 340 rentals per square mile, which is about the size of our central business district.

"I do still say that, generally, it's a good thing," Jared White, a senior transpo manager at City Hall and our de facto bike czar. "But we are about to cross a threshold where it could possibly get worse. If we have some formally regulated structure — if we have something with teeth — well, if those companies don't play nice, we'll remove their permit."

The city also wants access to the very thing some industry watchers expect is the only thing profitable about bike share: the data gold mine being collected by the GPS implants. But right now, White doesn't even know how many bikes are in Dallas. And more are coming every day. A rush to beat the regs, sounds like.

Anthony Fleo, LimeBike's Dallas general manager, told me Monday that the San Francisco-based company has 3,700 bikes on the ground here now but plans to up the ante to 5,000 before year's end. Ofo's U.S.-based head of communications, Taylor Bennett, said the Beijing-based company has around 4,000 bikes in Dallas, though "we just deployed several hundred more and will increase that."

And Shawn Ho at VBikes, the Garland-based company that brought bike share to Dallas in the first place, told me this week that he's heard other competitors are eyeing the market. Among them: Mobike, another Chinese company, which is slowly moving into the U.S. after a D.C. debut in September.

I asked how many bikes are being used every day. All the companies said they'd have to see if they could release that data. But I haven't heard back. Instead I got a press release from LimeBike full of vague stats like, "Dallas alone clocked 105,000 cumulative miles on LimeBikes since we launched in August."

I asked reps for the bike shares if they were selling renters' comings and goings. They all reiterated what Bennett said: "No no no no selling of the data here." But Jared White frets that that might well be "their overall intent." And I asked if they were making money.

LimeBike's Fleo gave the most honest answer: "We're generating revenue."

I think we're all about to get free bikes.