
Chinese bike-sharing firm Bluegogo has gone bankrupt: media reports - chihhsuan
http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/11-15/281078.shtml
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bfuller
Dallas went from having zero bikeshares to three companies in a matter of
days. Anecdotally I have seen the same green and silver bikes sitting in the
same places since they opened.

East Dallas has some wonderful biking (white rock lake is where lance
armstrong trained) but I feel like bike shares are replacements for short uber
rides, not taking bike paths for 14 miles to get into the city. I doubt the
average person in the city could even make it that far.

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StudentStuff
Dallas as with most post-war cities is sprawling, with most land being either
parking or roadway in the more urban areas. This makes cities built this way
much less usable for any form of transit besides driving, and even there you
see travel distances doubled due to the added parking at every building.

Seattle got quite lucky insofar as being not too spread out, with the ability
and demand to sustain 2.25 rides per bike per day[1]. Part of this is
sustained by a robust mass transit system most American cities lack where a
bike for the last couple thousand feet makes all the difference for a trip,
whereas without that backbone you won't see high ridership.

Often, these trips are called the missing link. Turns out, thousands of people
will pay to make these trips on bike every day here, versus using another mode
of transit.

1 - [http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2017/09/19/rolling-with-the-
homi...](http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2017/09/19/rolling-with-the-homies-
seattle-bike-share-pilot-is-a-model-for-other-cities/)

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rasz
It was obvious to anybody on the ground in China. Shenzhen has been buried in
bikes pumped by those scams for months, to the point of city mayor ordering
collecting abandoned ones as garbage.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694170)
134 days ago [-]:

"chinese bike share companies are VC scam, they dont care what happens to the
bikes, they are after the investors."

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StudentStuff
Sounds like waaay too much VC money combined with poor planning (or purposeful
mismanagement). No market has limitless potential, at some point you'll
saturate it in a given city.

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autogn0me
They could have just asked the Dutch if this was going to work.

~~~
rasz
It worked great(for founders), all bike sharing companies were startups seeded
with VC capital.

