I came across this blog post about the possibility of a bike share program for Portland, Oregon. Two comments on the post were particularly interesting:

I happen to be from Romania. So in the news from my country, they just discovered a bunch of dedicated cyclists that were "borrowing" about 10 bikes/month from the Paris bike share program for a very long one way trip east. These things keep popping up in the strangest places, like Marrakesh Morocco.

And this one on a previous program called Yellow Bikes:

As a former Yellow Bikes(YB) volunteer, we "dumbed down" bikes by making them single speed, and replacing tubes with rubber hose that made for a hard ride. Inevitably,those bikes we 'released' would end up lost/stolen'destroyed. The Community Cycling Center, our fiscal sponsor, ended up killing the program and replacing it,later on, with Create a Commuter (CAC). CAC has an element of ownership and personal investment,something YBs lacked.