There exist quite a few attempts at this and most work pretty well in my experience:
- Publibike in Switzerland (publibike.ch) operates your idea of cheaper docks: they are just a metal sign next to parking space with some (bluetooth-like) electronics in them to communicate with the bikes. You can only return your bike at one of these parking spaces. At the same time, they avoid the cost of installing fixed docks for each bike. They had some problems with their locks on the bikes not working properly, but these seem to be resolved and otherwise they work really well IMO.
- INDIGO weel (https://www.indigoweel.com/) is a free-floating system, but not totally free floating: you can only return your bike in GPS-fenced "allowed areas", which should be bike parking spots, avoiding the chaos of completely free-floating bikes. As GPS fences are quite broad, this doesn't work perfectly but it helps. Some of the schemes operated by Nextbike in Germany also work like that (they also operate with fixed docks in some cities, though).
I prefer these dock- or semi-dock-based systems to the totally free-floating ones, as if you know where the docks are its much easier and more reliable to actually find a bike there. Especially if you are travelling in a group, it will be a challenge to "collect" enough bikes with a free-floating system (unless you have so many bikes standing around on the streets that they become a public nuisance).
Nevertheless, I do not think judging free-floating systems by oBike is a good idea: oBike was uniquely bad in many respects (the quality of the bikes, the lack of local staff and support, the lack of GPS on the bikes, the need for a deposit etc.) and other free-floating schemes such as Limebike seem to work quite well.
The docks, here in Helsinki, are integrated well with the bus & tram API/app. That means you can see how many bikes are sat at each dock-point around the city, in real-time, which is pretty good.
- Publibike in Switzerland (publibike.ch) operates your idea of cheaper docks: they are just a metal sign next to parking space with some (bluetooth-like) electronics in them to communicate with the bikes. You can only return your bike at one of these parking spaces. At the same time, they avoid the cost of installing fixed docks for each bike. They had some problems with their locks on the bikes not working properly, but these seem to be resolved and otherwise they work really well IMO.
- INDIGO weel (https://www.indigoweel.com/) is a free-floating system, but not totally free floating: you can only return your bike in GPS-fenced "allowed areas", which should be bike parking spots, avoiding the chaos of completely free-floating bikes. As GPS fences are quite broad, this doesn't work perfectly but it helps. Some of the schemes operated by Nextbike in Germany also work like that (they also operate with fixed docks in some cities, though).
I prefer these dock- or semi-dock-based systems to the totally free-floating ones, as if you know where the docks are its much easier and more reliable to actually find a bike there. Especially if you are travelling in a group, it will be a challenge to "collect" enough bikes with a free-floating system (unless you have so many bikes standing around on the streets that they become a public nuisance).
Nevertheless, I do not think judging free-floating systems by oBike is a good idea: oBike was uniquely bad in many respects (the quality of the bikes, the lack of local staff and support, the lack of GPS on the bikes, the need for a deposit etc.) and other free-floating schemes such as Limebike seem to work quite well.