
As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong with Us? - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/china-beijing-dockless-bike-share.html
======
chairmanwow
I am currently living in Shanghai and I use Mobike, Ofo, or 赶赶单车 to get to
work everyday. I have logged over 250km between the services.

This article is largely unfair. The city has large swaths of sidewalk
established as bike parking zones. I can almost always find a bike zone within
10-50m. Furthermore, there are almost always parking attendants and security
guards outside of malls and subway stations ensuring that bikes are parked
correctly. Even when these people aren't present, I rarely ever see bikes
anywhere but the bike zones. And as much space as the bikes take up, it is
NOTHING compared to the parked cars along the streets.

Furthermore, I see company trucks collecting and relocating bikes multiple
times per week. They are constantly shifting bikes of high supply to areas of
demand. There are certain times of day (eg Saturday night at the Bund) where
there are untold legions of bikes, but car traffic is flowing well.

Many of the trips that I've taken on a Mobike were out of convenience. In
American cities the fastest mode of transportation is almost always a car.
However, because the bikes are essentially door-to-door with no delay, I can
almost always beat a hired car because there is no delay and I can zip between
waiting traffic.

Chinese cities are being strangled to death by the crazy growth in car
traffic. There has been insane immigration to cities and average income has
gone way up. The net effect is a lot more car usage. Every taxi driver I have
complains about the ever-worsening traffic conditions, year-over-year trip
times increasing etc.

Bike sharing does A LOT to alleviate this by providing a convenient, quick,
and cheap ($0.10-0.20 / 30min) method to travel. This is all ignoring the
obvious ecological impact of the many tons of CO2 not released by the saved
hydrocarbon fueled trips.

~~~
sberder
Living in Shanghai, closing on 2000km on mobike only. Try going to the flower
market on wanhangdu lu and you'll get an idea of the abuse of both bikes and
pavement. I love the service and I think it's a fantastic alternative to pubic
transports/taxi/DiDi but you can't deny the absolute lack of care of a lot of
users.

I regularly see: * Bikes locked with a separate lock * Bikes parked inside
compounds you can't access * Bikes parked inside a building on any given floor
(it's normal here for people to park their bike or electric scooter just
outside their door even in high rise) * Bikes parked on the street in the
middle of traffic

Even with those behaviors, those companies have completely reshaped the way
people move in Chinese cities.

~~~
sr_fahrenheit
This mirrors my experience in Berlin. In nice neighbourhoods you see the bikes
parked nicely, in rougher ones like where I live you often see them scattered
on the road, half broken. Being Berlin, I bet there's also lots of anti-
capitalist rage against them - I see a lot of them around my train station
with a flat back wheel and I suspect it's from the same angry person, and all
this started happening when they got rebranded from DB-bikes (DB is the
national train company, someone correct me if it's actuall private) into Lidl
bikes and got rid of the requirement of parking at docking stations at the
same time that more companies started appearing. I bet also if you go to
Frankfurt or München you don't see this kind of carnage.

------
zdw
Having just travelled to Beijing, these bikes literally are everywhere,
frequently stands of 20-50 or more from the many many companies that offer
them outside a subway station, so I can see the pushback about cluttering up
the place.

Most of the people I talked to are pretty positive on them - it's fairly easy
to find one, and they're dirt cheap to ride (most are sub-$0.10/hr if my math
is right).

I like to think of this as closer to Uber's driver-free endgame - manage a
bunch of rentable objects that provide transportation, except in this case
they're taking advantage of public parking areas and that's a public bad.

~~~
sethherr
The amount of space taken up by car parking makes me generally unsympathetic
to complaints about bike sharing "taking up too much public space" \- though
perhaps there is less car parking in china.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Space taken by car-parking is typically in dedicated parking lots: out of the
way and doesn't impede public rights-of-way - compare to having bicycles
ridden on sidewalks and interfering with car traffic.

~~~
sethherr
Also "interfering with car traffic" is silly. Bikes are traffic too and have
just as much right to being in the road as cars.

~~~
stephengillie
Many bicyclists are afraid to be on the road, and many drivers believe roads
are for aggressive car/truck drivers only. There is some basis for this, as
novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph for miles, and many
drivers are eager to prove their engine is stronger than a pair of legs.

~~~
Luc
> as novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph

That's 40 km/h. Are you trolling or is that a typo?

I've been bicycling nearly daily for >45 years and I've never gone that fast.

~~~
adrianN
It's not terribly hard for a fit male to maintain 40km/h for a while on a nice
racing bike. But I think 25km/h is a more reasonable top speed. It's also the
speed where electric bicycles stop supporting the driver, at least here in
Germany.

~~~
exDM69
40 km/h average is crazy! I can get slightly above 20 km/h sustained average
for about an hour. There's no way I could double that, and I'm pretty fit.

My 20 km/h includes a few stops and normal traffic so it's probably closer to
30 on a flat straight with no traffic. Perhaps a special bike with narrow
tires could help, but that's less versatile (and I need to ride on dirt roads
too).

The highest I've measured is 54 km/h, on a big down hill pedalling full
strength on top gear. I regularly exceed 30 km/h but not for sustained
periods.

~~~
adrianN
Of course 40km/h does not include traffic, hills, or wind. It is also pretty
crucial to have a bike with a racing geometry so that your head is low and air
resistance is reduced.

~~~
exDM69
40 km/h is not impossible by any means but as a sustained average speed it
takes a special bike and a person with pretty mighty athletic background.
Definitely not something for the average commuter. Even 20 km/h sustained for
an hour is more than most people can do.

I could _probably_ do 40 km/h for 15-30 minutes if I went all-in and had a
racing bike. But my commute includes dirt roads and pathways through the
forest so a racing bike is out of question and I don't want to take a shower
every day arriving to work.

I don't really have to share the road with cars at any point on my commute so
driving too slow isn't an issue. A part of the way is shared with pedestrians
(and slower bicyclists) so going too fast is more of a problem.

~~~
emj
1999 was the first year Tour de France cyclists managed to get 40km/h on
average for the whole 3200 km and three weeks long race. According to
[http://bikecalculator.com/](http://bikecalculator.com/) 40 km/h requires
between 260W and 450W from the rider, doing 40 km/h on avarage will be even
more extreme.

I've used a good recumbent bicycle and I could actually hold 35 km/h easily in
that one, in the same place I usually average 23 km/h upright with an ordinary
~$700 city bike.

------
edoceo
We have three vendors for $1 bikes in Seattle. Choose green, yellow or orange.
Nearly zero difference. Now they are being abused (hung from poles, dumped in
the lake, etc)

What's going to become of these 1000s of bikes toward our long winter, all the
casual sunny-day riders are gone.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
There was an article fairly recently on HN about how bike sharing is failing
in San Francisco because it's so hilly. All the bikes would start at the top
of hills and end up at the bottom and there was no system in place to relocate
them back to the top.

~~~
Pxtl
Seems like a pricing issue. Tag the stations by elevation and make a price
hike for trips that start at a high station and end at a low one, and vice
versa. Does SF not have an organization manually rebalancing teh stations?
Here in Hamilton you see pickups with trailers full of rental-bikes being
redistributed.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
They could even offer negative pricing for bikes that are out of place.

~~~
dredmorbius
Haul-back bonuses have been used in other domains for decades. Moving vans.
Railway cars

~~~
cylinder
Airport luggage carts

------
holri
Vienna had this problem decades ago when the city donated a lot of gratis
bikes without any registration / GPS whatsoever. Just take the bike and leave
it anywhere. They replaced the system with a station based one with
registration, and a small fee after 1 hour usage. This works well.

~~~
stevekemp
That's similar to the system here in Helsinki. There are specific stations all
over the city where you can collect/drop-off your bike.

You get 30 minutes of free time each time you "checkout" a bike, and are
charged extra if you go beyond that.

People do seem to use the system sensibly, taking a bike to go somewhere.
Doing their stuff, then taking a second bike home such that the don't keep the
same one for >30 minutes to incur the extra (small) charges.

------
b6
Rudeness and inconsiderateness are everywhere, but as anyone who has lived in
China for a long period of time can tell you, it is endemic in China. I'm not
aware of any place where the problem is generally thought to be as bad.

Why, I don't know. The one-two punches of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural
Revolution come to mind. As to why China was affected more than other places
that suffered similar trauma, maybe it's because China is big enough that it
can serve as its own world. Most Chinese people can choose to have no dealings
with foreigners if they want, unlike somewhere like, say, Cambodia.

The bikes certainly aren't causing some wave of inconsiderateness. It's just a
more visible way for the extreme inconsiderateness of the general mentality in
China to be expressed.

~~~
Taniwha
I think there's a cultural thing going on here - in many places people are
paid to sweep the streets so the city doesn't put out public trash cans ...
people aren't being 'dirty' here, they just put their trash in different
places

(and yes I find it hard to throw stuff on the ground too, I hold on to it in
China, I'm socialised that way)

------
kisstheblade
Recently visited china and noticed that the people there behave really filthy.
They eat their lunches on the go when walking in the city, and when they are
done they just dump the styrofoam containers and leftovers right there in the
street. Then city workers collect them in huge stinky mounds waiting to be
ferried of somewhere. Apparently city living is such a new concept there that
a sence of community hasn't evolved and everybody at least would try to take
care of the common spaces.

~~~
Markoff
why wouldn't they throw it away if they know someone will clean it in few
hours? or you have street sweepers unemployed?

it's same with fast food, only ducks who wanna make fast food workers
unemployed take their tray and trash from table in fast food chain knowing
there is designated person collecting these trays and cleaning tables

------
nkrumm
It's worth pointing out that that the Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) has been
providing this sort of service for at least a decade (I remember seeing them
parked outside of train stations in 2008):

[https://www.callabike-interaktiv.de/de/registrieren](https://www.callabike-
interaktiv.de/de/registrieren)

~~~
denzil_correa
There are many such bike sharing services in Germany like LidleBike [0] and
NextBike [1]. But, I think it's relatively much more expensive than owning
your own bike.

[0] [https://www.lidl-bike.de/de](https://www.lidl-bike.de/de)

[1] [https://www.nextbike.net/en/](https://www.nextbike.net/en/)

------
Baeocystin
I found this video by ex-pat YouTuber Serpentza to be quite informative on the
issue, and he has been living in China for long enough to have an insider's
perspective. Well worth a watch.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g)

------
m-i-l
The problem of vandalism might be worse in the UK[0], e.g.

"the scale of vandalism took him [Steve Pyer, Mobike UK's general manager] by
surprise. It has been far worse than in any of the Asian countries where
Mobike operates 5m bikes"

[0]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters-
bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

------
princeb
melbourne and singapore are also seeing these problems. long story short,
there are twats in every country.

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-17/obike-responds-to-
crit...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-17/obike-responds-to-criticism-of-
bike-sharing-scheme/8813574)

[https://vulcanpost.com/608463/bike-sharing-
singapore/](https://vulcanpost.com/608463/bike-sharing-singapore/)

~~~
Gigablah
Yeah, there were a few highly-publicized cases of bike vandalism in Singapore
but thankfully it seems to be subsiding. I'm actually seeing a lot more bikes
from multiple bike-sharing companies around my neighbourhood these days. It's
definitely catching on.

------
CaliforniaKarl
The Bay Area already has this, in the form of Google Bikes, which sometimes
(often?) find their way off-campus.

I have before come across one outside the entrance to my apartment building
(the one I live in, I mean): The bike was standing on the walkway, obstructing
it. I found that interesting, because the building has two underground secured
area for bikes, and residents can take their bikes through to their
apartments.

You may reply "Well, where was the outside bike rack?" And you are right,
there is none. But, in response I bring up the Whole Foods not too far away:
They have a bike parking area, and the Google bike was parked not there.

Of course, it's possible (likely?) that a Googler hadn't left it there:
Someone could've taken it. Either way, I think the point still stands: You
have effectively a station-less bike sharing plan, and bikes are ending up
outside of where they're supposed to be.

Does Google still do 20% projects? This seems like an interesting thing to
study!

------
brad0
Aren't all of these bike sharing startups a symptom of a bigger cause?

Afaik there's a huge property bubble in China, particularly in Beijing. A lot
of people have become billionaires quickly and they're looking to invest that
money into something else. But the bike sharing startups are a bubble within
themselves.

I wonder when it's all going to pop.

~~~
beguiledfoil
What's unsustainable about cheap bikes?

~~~
kurthr
Its not about cheap bikes. The bikes break, are destroyed, left somewhere
useless/dangerous, or are stolen/confiscated. The investment money that paid
for them was leveraged (an investment/loan). The income from the surplus of
nearly free bikes can't pay back the investors and retain their ridership.
Meanwhile, people who live near a point of interest have to deal with a
massive pile of dumped (possibly broken) bikes in front of where they
work/live... and they pay a public price.

~~~
ospider
technically, the newer models get GPS track devices builtin, so the chance of
maintenance might be smaller than you thought.

------
paradite
A universally applicable phenomenon where lack of ownership leads to uncivil
behavior got caught in China due to its sheer scale of sharing economy and NYT
says "Great material for China bashing. Make sure we get a good title to
reflect how bad China is."

~~~
rixed
There are also many users behaving properly. Do you have data showing that
property does not yield to as much uncivil behavior? Like, for instance, do
car owners behave better than shared bike owner?

------
keithpeter
The OA links to an article about dockless bike sharing in Manchester UK [1].
Quote from the Manchester article

 _" On launch day, the Chinese designer told me the bikes were basically
indestructible and should last four years without maintenance. It took a
matter of hours before local scallies worked out how to disable the GPS
trackers and smash off the back wheel locks."_

Truly "the street finds its _own_ uses for things". The kids are _hacking_ the
bikes for fun and display of prowess which is normal-ish behaviour for
adolescents. These objects suddenly arrived in the world, so the local
teenagers decided to explore this new and interesting crop.

The OA mentions New York city authorities sending cease and desist letters to
a dock-less bike sharing company in the city. I'm hardly surprised, the
pavements need active management at the best of times.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters-
bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

------
jaclaz
Just in case, previous NYT article:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing-
bike-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing-bike-
sharing.html)

On other news, this summer, August, Mobike started being deployed in Florence
and Milan, Italy:

[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/26/content_302...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/26/content_30250146.htm)

it is too early/too few bikes are in service yet, next test will be London:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/mobik...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/mobike-
china-bike-sharing-scheme-london-launch-boris-bicycles-no-docking-stations-
santander-a7868916.html)

but I bet we'll soon see if Europeans will be more polite than the Chinese ...

Manchester, UK, seems like having the same issues:

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters-
bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

In any case the Chinese problems must be large enough to have the Government
intervene:

[https://phys.org/news/2017-08-china-issues-bike-sharing-
guid...](https://phys.org/news/2017-08-china-issues-bike-sharing-guidelines-
complaints.html)

------
11thEarlOfMar
It seems to say more about the mentality of the investing community than
anything else. I'd say good ideas are scarce and/or investors aren't really
able to identify them, so they wind up doing the same thing everyone else is
doing.

Would love to hear examples of recent investments in Chinese startups that
have businesses based on something truly novel.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"Liulishuo raises approximately $100M in Series C funding to extend its lead
in building smart AI English teachers"

[http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liulishuo-raises-
app...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liulishuo-raises-
approximately-100m-in-series-c-funding-to-extend-its-lead-in-building-smart-
ai-english-teachers-300494378.html)

------
rhaps0dy
How about docked bike sharing? Barcelona has been having one for some time, it
doesn't have many of the problems here, even though our suzhi is not very
high. It does have the problem that you have to start and finish in a dock,
but that seems minor.

~~~
lozenge
The investment required is huge. On top of the costs for the bikes ($80 each)
there's another $1000+ to install the docks. Not to mention the huge Chinese
bureaucracy to navigate if you wanted to install docks in public spaces.

[https://www.itdp.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/ITDP_Bike_Sh...](https://www.itdp.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/ITDP_Bike_Share_Planning_Guide.pdf) (page 109)

------
contingencies
Here in Shenzhen where it is stinking hot _all_ the damn time (we don't get
freezing, snowy/sleeted, dust storms or 'normal') and windy/wet _some_ of the
time, there's government e-bike stations all about my area. Unfortunately I
can't use them because they don't take foreign passport numbers. Otherwise, I
would.

~~~
kirerukaze
I live in Shenzhen and I use Mobike all the time. The biggest obstacle was
getting a bank account to pay with. The identity verification process was to
take a picture of your passport and a picture of you holding your passport,
and then it took half a day for Mobike to verify the information.

~~~
contingencies
Mobike != government system.

------
juiyout
If there is money tied to rider's mannerism, I would be confident to predict
that almost all the observed issues will be resolved.

~~~
askvictor
I think they have the capacity to do this (o-bikes in Melbourne have similar
issues), but haven't enabled it yet while trying to build up a customer base;
additionally there is nothing to stop dickheads kicking over parked bikes for
no particular reason.

------
Rafert
The introduction of similar oBikes in Amsterdam and Rotterdam prompted
comments from my friends seeing similar bad behaviour. Meanwhile I live in
Montreal, where with the Bixi bikes you need to return them to a station
(spread throughout the city) and there's no problem.

------
eungyu
I just hope we don't sling shot back to individualistic ownership driven
economy (as opposed to sharing economy). Sincerely hoping that after the dust
settles there is a tiny bit of forward progress.

------
devmunchies
This is a concept that you learn in an intro to economics class in college.
People will abuse a free, limited resource. A sharing-based economy doesn't
work.

~~~
xvilka
It's not an economic issue, it's a human nature. Just most of the people lack
morals, no matter what country. Sad, but true.

~~~
esturk
What's easier to change? An business model or human nature? Clever people
already know not to fight human nature and build their business models around
it.

~~~
xvilka
I'm not saying we should change human nature, it's impossible at the one human
life scale. Just correcting this is not exactly an economics. But yes, of
course business model should just keep this in mind. Even sharing economy can
adapt to this requirement and still be profitable.

------
jiyinyiyong
Let's see what will happen outside China. Then compare them with data :P

------
kstenerud
"China has been pushing for years to develop technology products that catch
fire overseas."

I almost pissed myself laughing at this line.

~~~
wybiral
Shucks. Samsung beat them to it...

~~~
Markoff
wasn't the battery supplier from China?

