Google Loses Up to 250 Bikes a Week (siliconbeat.com)

What's happening to Google's 1,100 Gbikes? The Mercury News reports: Last summer, it emerged that some of the company's bikes -- intended to help Googlers move quickly and in environmentally friendly fashion around the company's sprawling campus and surrounding areas -- were sleeping with the fishes in Stevens Creek. And now, a new report has revealed that 100 to 250 Google bikes go missing every week, on average. "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... Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg even admitted to helping himself to a Google bike to go to a movie after a meeting at the company's campus, according to the WSJ.
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.

They've discovered them as far away as Mexico, Alaska, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Comments

No rule of law

[Anonymous Coward]

Immoral behavior such as petty theft has been endemic to the point that public officials fear not confessing to committing it from time to time. Citizens take note: the rule of law is failing in this country. You are only as free as you can afford to be, if you are today’s lucky winner in the game of arbitrary and capricious “law and order”.

Re:No rule of law

[swb]

I think it's pretty localized. Where I live -- and I mean my immediate neighborhood -- property crime was non-existent 20 years ago. Now I hear about nuisance property crime all the time, garage break-ins, mail & package theft, car break-ins (including use of high-tech keybob repeaters). The city councillor even has started to acknowledge it.

I believe that crime may be down nationally, but IMHO that's a useless statistic for individual locations where people live most of the time. It's badly skewed by large population centers and their localized trends as well.

Re:No rule of law

[lucasnate1]

You don't understand! Cheating customers is "free market" and "healthy greed", not theft!

The I'm-feeling-lucky department?

[Krishnoid]

I'd think it would be more the This-is-why-we can't-have-nice-things department.

Re:The I'm-feeling-lucky department?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think the bikes would be available for anyone to use on google property, transiting between google properties, or for the employee to transit somewhere near by say for lunch with the intent to return the bike to google's property.

Any other use I would feel falls under the same theft laws as removing a shopping cart from the property of a retailer. Shopping carts are there for anyone to use at the retail establishment, but is considered theft if removed from the property of the retail establishment.

Should All Be Gone

[mentil]

What's happening to Google's 1,100 Gbikes? [snip]100 to 250 Google bikes go missing every week [snip] they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes

So ~175 bikes go missing each week, of which ~120 are recovered. So ~55 go permanently missing each week. If there's 1,100 total, that means they'll all be gone after 5 months. Presumably they're being reordered to replace the ones that disappear.
Also, hiring 30 contractors to track these down? Surely there's a more efficient way of doing this. Getting people to pay a nominal security deposit for use of the bikes would encourage people to return them ($1 would work surprisingly well, even for people making 6 figures. Psychology, bitches!). There are other, stick-based methods, but then more people will just dump them in creeks.

Re:I worked a mile from their hq, we used them all

[Anonymous Coward]

So because the bikes were "just chilling out at the train station" you felt it was your right to take them? If somebody has a television just chilling in their house do you think it's okay to take that as well?

It's not an "unofficial bike share," it's theft. The fact that you don't see anything wrong with taking other people's bikes is very worrying.

Re:I worked a mile from their hq, we used them all

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly How do you know those bikes wern't left at the train station for google employees to use to transit from the station to the office? Now they are without a bike and have to walk thanks to your selfishness.

What google should have done is made their bikes just like the bikes commonly used for bike shares, with the electronic device on them to check out/in the bike. and track its location for recovery They could just use the employee ids to check out/in bikes and not charge like a fee. With google being the company that it is, you would think they would love to collect stats like that about which employees are using them and how frequently.

My experience with freerange bikes looks like this

[pecosdave]

At NASA we had "free range" bikes, which were just bikes that got abandoned or donated into common use, they were marked. I found out that even though the idea was that they should be randomly distributed to bike racks around the campus, the reality was they were usually piled up at one particular administrative building. See, administrative people tend to have meetings, lots of them, at various buildings on site. They would walk to those other buildings, then grab a free range bike back to their own building - EVERY TIME.

There were bigger issues than that, if you brought your own personal bike to the space center - and many people didn't bother to lock them up because theft was quite rare inside the fence - the same asses who wouldn't just get their own bike - would take someones obviously personal bike too if it wasn't locked up. I personally had spokes broken on my bike because I did have it locked up and someone jerked on it in the rack hard enough to break spokes as the wheel rolled back. Even though out in public I run cable locks through both wheels at the space center I started locking up just the frame outside to prevent damage from a "don't care" type.

I even saw free range bikes standing in the middle of parking lots. It was obvious that someone rode the bike all the way to their car and left it.

I love the idea of a free-range, common use bike pool. I found that in reality people are assholes and don't care. Even in place like the space center where I know for a fact you can leave a brand-new Alienware laptop unattended for weeks at a time in full view in a not actually public but still accessible to many area with nothing holding it down but a power and Ethernet cable. I found that even in a place where people have shared common goals that a shared candy bowl will have one person pick out all their favorite stuff and hoard it in a personal lock box.

Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.