Bike sharing will be a nice adoption to the city and doesn’t have to be only for tourists. Think of it like card to go but only for bikes, plenty of locals will be using the service.
How do you guys feel about dockeless versus docked bike sharing?
I prefer docked as it seems to be more manageable and predictable. I spent a few years in Montreal with it's Bixi system and it was brilliant in most ways for tourists and locals alike. The challenge is you really need a concentration of stations on almost every block (Montreal has ~600 racks, ~10,000 bikes). Montreal's battles for road space are far more epic than Calgary's (due to narrower roads, 4x the people and legendary traffic congestion), but our political climate makes on-street stalls a bit of stretch for suburban councillors currently (see cycle-track implementation), whereas auto-centric Montreal political will has largely resigned to defeat in the centre/inner city as it is increasingly active focused in all ways.
Dockless is a good first step for us given our state of evolution. My only concern is from the perspective that it is fully the private sector running it. Sure it's free for taxpayers, but it means it is also unregulated and can be pulled / service adjusted rapidly (arguable a good thing in some cases, so it's not all bad). But it is difficult to build a reliable local culture of bike share if it doesn't stick around long enough or changes all the time, has barriers to some user communities, and is not integrated to the transportation network. Bixi, for example, is linked directly to the STM (Montreal's transit agency) where they offer steep discounts together, co-locate bike stations at metro plazas, transit tap cards can unlock bicycles etc.
With all that said, none of these things require docked/dockless or private/public exclusively. I just don't think we are there yet in maturity to pull off tighter integration as a municipality (e.g. private bike share + public transit) in a similar fashion if the bike share isn't a publicly managed. One day though! (I hope)
