ranking bike programs

I've now ridden bikes through sharing programs in Lyon, Paris, Barcelona, and Brussels. My thoughts:

Barcelona has by far the worst system. You can't choose which bike you want, if there's 1 good bike and 5 broken ones, you have to keep on taking out a random bike until you get the good one. The bikes are lighter, but their "baskets" are pretty useless. There are no temporary cards, which maybe is necessary because of the inevitable tourist onslaught. Worst of all, the system shuts down at midnight, which makes no sense. Points for cute name: "Bicing," playing off the BCN.

Paris, Lyon, and Brussels have largely the same setup, because JC Decaux runs all of them. Props to Paris for: maps on the kiosks, scrollable maps in the kiosks, tap-n-go bikes so you don't have to wait in line. Brussels has all those too, and its bikes have 7 gears (3 for Paris). Paris suffers because it's actually a little big to bike around in, and the ratio of stations to people and area is kind of low. Brussels has 2 nice aspects. First, the city has made almost all one-way streets two-way for bicycles, so bikes can go anywhere they want. Not sure how the cars feel about it, but I liked it. Second, the city is so small that the kiosk maps can be incredibly detailed and also cover most of the city, so you can avoid getting lost.

Lyon still wins in the end, for me, because it has so many stations -- 340 for a population of under a million, as opposed to 1000 for 10 million in Paris, or ~100 for a million in Brussels. There are a lot of bike lanes. Big downside -- the touch screens that make everything a pain.