Originally Posted by
daoswald
With a scooter, I can pick it up wherever I find it, and leave it wherever I'm done with it. With the bike-share in my city, they are not "dockless", so I have to leave it at specific locations, and I never know if there will be a dock near my destination.
So if they solve that issue (and why wouldn't they?) then I would have a preference toward bikes.
I agree with your bike preference. The only real advantage I see with scooters is that they are smaller and thus you can put more of them around a city using less parking space.
Still, I don't think either scooter- or bike- sharing has reached the highest levels of spatial-efficiency with their parking designs. Scooters, for example, could be stacked so the decks fit on top of each other and the handlebar stems clip together. You could have a single pole with 10 or 20 scooters stacked up on it.
With bikes, folding handlebars and pedals are key. They exist but I don't think any bike shares make use of them. If you could stack five bikes in a space of five feet, you could have little five-foot wide racks of share bikes all over a city. That can't accommodate as many users as scooters stacked 10-20 high on a pole, but it's still pretty dense, imo; certainly a lot more spatially efficient than cars.