Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist.

But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this.

In recent weeks, hundreds of stations have sprouted in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — empty husks sprawled 30 or 50 spaces long on city sidewalks and streets, anticipating rows of bicycles that will soon protrude from the kiosk slots. The critics say the kiosks are a blight. They clash with the character of residential areas of the West Village or Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They are already magnets for pigeons, garbage bags and dogs in need of relief.

Lawsuits have been prepared. Kiosks have been defaced. At one community meeting, an inelegant analogy was drawn between the Bloomberg administration and the Taliban. “None of us are against bikes — most of us have bikes that we stow in our building,” said Lynn Ellsworth, 54, from TriBeCa. “But why they put these giant racks in these little streets is crazy to me.”