“The degradation of the Bikeshare system has been building…to the point this system is becoming completely unusable.”

“Dear PoPville,

The degradation of the Bikeshare system has been building for a couple years now, but the last few months have seen a massive acceleration to that trend to the point this system is becoming completely unusable. There is zero maintenance done by Lyft at this point. Over the last few weeks the majority of the bikes I get are malfunctioning, either with no e-assist from the e-bikes or chain problems on the normal bikes.

And this is when I am lucky to actually find an available bike because there are so many out of commission (not just bikes, but there have been obvious problems with the docks everywhere), and they don’t move them around the city anymore. Today was the culmination: at least 5 stations that I can see, in both DuPont and Adams Morgan locations are completely shut down — the station is “out of service”, so there are tens of bikes there that cannot be undocked. I attach a picture below just of what I could get in my area, but there are more stations outside of it also out of service. I’ve tried customer service with Lyft and you get responses back but they basically just laugh at you or ignore you.

The city has a responsibility to make sure this system is usable. I never drive to work, but honestly I feel like a complete Schmuck for not doing so. The bus system is horrendously unreliable, they can’t even track when the buses will arrive. If you don’t have a garage or somewhere to store your own bike, the only reliable transport the city provides to get to work is in a private car.”