Ditto in Seattle. And I think it's important to understand that it's not primarily the riders (of whom there are very very few) who are paying to ride these things and then dumping them wherever, it is the "assholes" employed by the bike rental companies who are doing the park-uglifying, yard-infringing, sidewalk-blocking bike spamming.
"Dockless" in theory is only nice if there are a limited number of bikes in distribution. In practice, it means that the employees of the bike rental companies will leave as many of their bikes as they can wherever they want for however long they want (case in point: late last fall there were at least 40 bikes dumped by three rental companies on one two block length of one street in my neighborhood). Cities with city councils that actually care about the quality of life of their residents (SF, Oakland) moved quickly to prohibit these rental companies from spamming their products all over streets, parks, sidewalks, yards. The rest of us have to suffer.
That's exactly the issues that Dallas is going through right now. A few of the bikeshare companies (Ofo, Mobike) are Chinese companies that mass produce cheap bicycles and they don't really seem to care if the bikes get damaged/lost, so they are pretty careless about where and how they place them. I've personally witnessed one of the bikeshare trucks slowly driving down the street while someone in the back literally just threw bikes off the truck onto the sidewalk.
The bikeshare companies also currently seem to be using the method of spamming bikes everywhere and hoping they get used, rather than trying to place them where they are actually needed. There was a picture of one of the companies in Dallas placing bikes on the side of a highway, with no pedestrian access, no sidewalks, and nothing even resembling a bike lane. That's just dangerous.
Fortunately the city is starting to crack down on them a bit, but it's a real shame that these companies took a cool idea and are pretty much ruining it with their piss-poor execution.
The part that irks me maybe the most is that every one of these bikes is both an advertisement and a physical business. Dumping by individuals and businesses is regulated/forbidden. Food trucks are regulated. Newspaper stands are regulated. A corporation can't just set up a dozen kiosks in the middle of a busy sidewalk. Yet spamming a thousand rental bikes willy-nilly around a city is ok?
This whole thing is like a lab experiment in unregulated business expansion. I can't believe it's gone on for as long as it has.
"Dockless" in theory is only nice if there are a limited number of bikes in distribution. In practice, it means that the employees of the bike rental companies will leave as many of their bikes as they can wherever they want for however long they want (case in point: late last fall there were at least 40 bikes dumped by three rental companies on one two block length of one street in my neighborhood). Cities with city councils that actually care about the quality of life of their residents (SF, Oakland) moved quickly to prohibit these rental companies from spamming their products all over streets, parks, sidewalks, yards. The rest of us have to suffer.