Updated at 12:15 p.m. Friday to include comments from LimeBike and Ofo representatives.

Dallas City Hall is running out of patience with the five companies that have turned parts of this city into bike-rental graveyards.

Thursday night, City Manager T.C. Broadnax sent a letter to LimeBike, Ofo, VBikes, Spin and Mobike giving them until Feb. 9 to clean up the clutter currently passing for Dallas' dockless bike-share program. If those companies don't meet the deadline, Broadnax wrote, the city "may be left with no choice but to begin removing bicycles in its rights of way, sidewalks, trails and/or trailheads that are identified as obstructions or hazards."

In his missive, Broadnax lays out specific rules of the road, chief among them: "Relocate all bicycles."

By that, the city manager explains, he wants the companies to get their bikes off all sidewalks narrower than 10 feet in width and out of the way of sidewalk-curb ramps. He also wants them removed from "turf, landscaping, or other unimproved surfaces." And in a move sure to please the likes of the Friends of the Katy Trail, which has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to express its displeasure with the extraordinary number of bikes clogging up the trail, the city manager also wants the two-wheelers relocated to trail heads.

Appearing on The Ticket's morning show Dunham and Miller on Friday morning, Mayor Mike Rawlings said he was "pleased T.C. stepped up," and added that he, too, had called some of the bike-share companies and told them "there are some new rules we're going to have to live by."

"We're going through a stage of innovation here," Rawlings said. "The key is, can we learn from it quick enough and kinda get it back to a manageable number? I think citizens want more walkability, they want more bikeability, more bike lanes. We need to do that. But there is a role for government in here."

Perhaps your team could take some of those bikes away on their ‘daily’ rounds to the Trail. We have an average of 13 total bikes ridden each hour so there will never be a need for your 100+ @limebike on our Trail. We’ve asked nicely several times. Let’s keep Dallas beautiful! https://t.co/7yDQgcayQY — Katy Trail (@KatyTrail) January 16, 2018

In a separate memo sent to the Dallas City Council Thursday night, Broadnax estimates there are about 20,000 buck-an-hour bikes in the city — a far cry from the zero that were on the streets back in August, when Garland-based VBikes was the first to roll into town. Broadnax told the council that a sixth company, British Columbia-based U-Bicycles, is also eyeing the market.

City officials first met with reps from the bike-share companies on Dec. 7, when they were told they needed to be more vigilant about collecting strays and straightening up the hundreds of fallen-over bikes lining downtown, Uptown and Lower Greenville sidewalks. Jared White, a senior transportation manager at City Hall and Dallas' de facto bike czar, said shortly after that sit-down that city officials thought they'd gotten the message.

"All participants expressed understanding and agreement," Broadnax wrote in Thursday's letter.

But nothing changed — except the number of complaints the city has received about the bikes, which seem to breed like Star Trek tribbles. As Rawlings put it Friday, the bikes "asexually reproduce or something."

Since last month's meeting, Broadnax writes, "the city has not seen much improvement in bicycle fleet management, and the situation continues to deteriorate."

A LimeBike rental bike floats in White Rock Lake in Dallas on Dec. 4, 2017. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

For months the city has taken a hands-off approach to bike-share, in large part because Dallas was once desperate to get rentals on the road — preferably ones with docking stations, like you see in New York or Fort Worth. But that would have cost millions the city didn't have. So city officials gave VBikes and its well-funded competitors, most based out of China, a wide berth in the hopes that the market would sort itself out and there would be one or two companies left standing.

Instead, City Hall wound up with a mess that continues to spread across the city as new operators come to town and existing ones keep dropping off more and more bikes. The pilot program was meant to last six months. But as Rawlings said, "We got through three, four months and realized we have some real issues."

I support bike share and the free market but it is time for these companies to act responsibliy and control the bike litter. https://t.co/VnpTTGtWIB — Jennifer S. Gates (@cmjsgates) January 19, 2018

As a result, it's likely the city will wind up regulating bikes in coming months. It's not yet clear how, but White has said in recent weeks that Dallas could limit the number of bikes allowed in some part of the city. The companies might also have to pay for permits that let them plant bikes on the public right of way. After all, Rawlings said, "Other companies pay for use of the sidewalks," among them restaurants who want outdoor seating.

Broadnax wrote Thursday that the council's Mobility Solutions, Infrastructure, and Sustainability Committee will be briefed on staff's recommendations either next month or in March.

In that memo to the council, Broadnax repeated what he told the bike-share companies: If they don't clean up their act, the city could be forced to collect all bikes left in the right of way. Should it come to that, Broadnax said, they will "be made available at a centralized location for retrieval by the bike share companies."

The companies maintain they have local crews straightening and redistributing bikes, and that they're working with the city to "build the best bike-share program for Dallas," in the words of one Ofo representative. They also blame the clutter on riders tossing bikes aside when they've reached their destination -- which is bound to happen with dockless bikes meant to be ridden to and left at a destination -- and "bad actors" who simply revel in making a mess.

"We're proud to be part of the solution, with our extensive local operations team working daily to ensure Ofo bikes are parked in accordance with local laws and redistributed away from wheelchair ramps, building entrances and landscaped areas," Ofo spokesperson Taylor Bennett said Friday. "While we cannot stop vandalism and bad actors, we do our best to respond immediately to any issues and ensure it goes unseen, and are regularly educating our riders on how and where to properly park."

LimeBike spokesperson Mary Caroline Pruitt said via email that the company "welcome[s] the letter as an opportunity to examine both the successes and the challenges of dockless bike-share experiencing such rapid growth."

On The Ticket, the mayor had some ideas of his own about how to clear the clutter.

"For me I'd have a pickup truck, and every [one] on the ground, I'd just put them in the pickup truck and drive them to the auto pound," Rawlings said, stressing that this was a personal suggestion and not necessarily an official proposal. But, later, he did mention something about charging the bike-rental companies $50 a bike to get their rides out of the pound, which sounds not unlike Highland Park's ordinance that lets the city collect bikes left overnight and charge the companies to get them out of lockup.