Bike-sharing programs are springing up everywhere nowadays, but Google's version might be the most peculiar of them all.
What makes it so unusual? It turns out that residents of the company's hometown have taken it upon themselves to freely use these two-wheelers, which are intended exclusively for Google staff.
According to the Wall Street Journal, several hundred of these so-called Gbikes are reportedly disappearing each week from Google's campus in Mountain View, California, and the tech giant is struggling to figure out a solution.
For a corporation renowned for seemingly knowing everything about its users, it's rather ironic that it has so little insight into the whereabouts of its colorful bicycles. Mountain View locals are stepping onto the campus to snatch them for complimentary rides to their destinations. Once these bikes enter "the wild," they essentially become part of an informal public bike-sharing system and can end up anywhere, with people repeatedly grabbing them for quick trips when they spot them left unattended on sidewalks, outside shops, or in other spots.
Among the residents making use of these bicycles is Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg, who admitted to hopping on a Gbike for a ride to a nearby cinema after a meeting at Google's campus. While some locals seem to think the bikes are available for all residents to use, others ride them as a way of taking something back from the company they accuse of taking over the city.
In an effort to retain its bikes, Google plans to begin testing smart locks that can only be unlocked by Google employees using a compatible smartphone app. The company also has five teams of collectors scouring Mountain View's streets for Gbikes, which have been found everywhere from the roof of a local sports bar to a nearby creek (the team has waders to retrieve them from the water). One bike even appeared in a TV commercial for cosmetics brand Garnier.
The company's bike-sharing program launched for its Mountain View employees a decade ago, and the bikes have been steadily vanishing from the campus ever since.
To better understand how its stolen bikes are being used, Google began attaching GPS trackers to some of them last year. To its surprise, the trackers revealed one Gbike as far away as Mexico, while another somehow made it to Alaska. Given that Google Maps indicates the 3,142-mile journey would take 276 hours to complete, we assume the single-speed bike wasn't pedaled the entire distance.
