BIKETOWNpdx

The app does what it’s supposed to for the most part. If you don’t keep moving while you have a bike it will end your ride and charge you $25. It doesn’t make any sense. I stop to take a phone call and while I’m standing next to the bike it locks itself and charges me $25 for “not properly ending my ride.” It’s a rental that is exclusively charged by the minute. What difference does it make whether I’m moving or not? Literally just keep charging me the per minute rate. If I actually failed to end the ride then you could just keep charging me until it’s out of battery and make way more than $25. But they don’t do that, because they don’t actually think you improperly ended your ride. It’s a nonsensical “gotcha” fee that they charge their paying customers whenever they get the chance. I pay $100 per year for a membership and as far as I can tell, it’s literally impossible to get in touch with anyone at the company. Bike fails to unlock? You’re still paying the unlock fee. Take out an e-bike and the motor stops working while saying it has 20 miles of battery? Muscle your way to a dock with a 100 pound bike or pay a fee. All the time I’ll reserve a bike only for the map marker to move somewhere completely different. The glitch is so consistent that I’ve learned not to reserve a bike without making sure I remember exactly where it is since I know I soon won’t be able to use the app to locate it. They and Lime have a local duopoly so we’re stuck with them, but they don’t value you their customers at all and I can’t wait for another company to enter the market.

So many broken bikes, broken locks that keep on charging you long after you’ve returned the bikes. Seems like a scam.

Don’t be surprised when your trip/session doesn’t end once you lock it up at your destination. It’s happened three times to me already, frustrating and obviously maximizing profit from customers who deserve better. Please save yourself the time & stress and don’t use these bikes.

I find a bike in an area outside the green zone just on the sidewalk- as I scan I’m not warned that it will ACTIVELY fight me as I bike it back to a station. Essentially I returned an abandoned bike as it actively fought me AND IT CHARGES 17 dollars? ARE YOU INSANE? I’ll just uber next time. #### Lift and BIKETOWN

Even though I prefer the functionality of Biketown scooters over Lime scooters, I will always choose Lime over Biketown because their customer support near-instantly resolved a problem Biketown would not fix. Biketown support refused to end my ride or acknowledge that I was in a parking zone when my location in the app was inaccurate, even after sending a photo of the scooter locked in front of the biketown/lime parking sign. They kept telling me things like “move closer to the parking zone” when I couldn’t possibly get any closer, and the app showed me 20 feet over in the street. They said they couldn’t remotely end my ride and it’d automatically end after 25 hours. This was unacceptable because I was supposed to be leaving on a camping trip with no cell service. I had to ride the scooter about half a mile away to park it and walk back, turning a 10-minute ride into a 45-minute ordeal. I nearly missed the trip as a result. A week later, I ran into the same issue with Lime, and after I messaged support my ride was ended near-instantly with zero back-and-forth. Additionally, there is no simple way to report being unable to start a ride and I was charged to unlock a non-functioning scooter. Lime makes it easy to report this issue. I was also forced to walk a mile at 1am after the app wouldn’t load scooter locations or scan scooters directly in front of me despite my internet working perfectly.