A TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
first up let me say that i'm not anti-bike. i love bikes, i own one, which ok, admittedly i don't ride that often, cos i prefer walking, but still, bikes are great. what i am against is the use of public space for private profit*, and these fucking ebikes are taking up a lot of public space (i also hate them for a bunch of other reasons, such as people riding them on the footpath and/or dumping the bikes in ways that block the footpath especially for the elderly and those with limited mobility, but even if people only rode them on the road and parked them carefully they'd still take up heaps of space, and i'm not even counting those delivery bikes, uber eats, hungrypanda etc, which i also fucking hate). anyway, the types and number of bikes vary from city to city (i'm in sydney) and from area to area (i'm in kings cross) but a recent estimate was 20,000 in sydney and counting (not surprisingly the companies don't share the actual numbers) the majority of which were lime bikes, but there's also 'hello ride' and 'ario', and i think people underestimate just how much space they take up, especially when you add a bit of a buffer around them, so here's some rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations. you can adjust the number of bikes, as well as the amount of space around the bikes, as well as the percent of bikes on the ground on their side (which take up even more room).
ADJUST
based on the above, the amount of public space that these fucking bikes take up is:
anyway, fuck these things, the companies that profit from them, and the dickheads that use 'em and then just dump 'em in the middle of the footpath.