This swiftly changed my perspective on this "mess."
It's easy to forget that 1) both disruption & scale always create mess, 2) media thrives on turning mess into outrage, and 3) we're numb to outrage over 100 year old tech.
Even if we don't drive our cars all the time, we don't throw them into a pile and break them. We take care of our cars, keeping them for years, and when they are no longer used, they are recycled.
Depends on how strict your countries DVLA is. If you dump a car the last registered owner is going to get charged and fined for fly tipping - in the UK
I don’t think the article is about bikes piling up the in the street. It’s more about oversupply and the distorted operating cost of bike sharing in China.
From a friend of mine working in this space: it’s cheaper for these companies to keep dumping new bikes onto the street rather than finding and repairing the misplaced and broken ones.
So imagine you live in a dorm with someone who never washes his mugs and leaves them everywhere because he gets free mugs from some mug oversupply place.
The cars have space reserved for them, so they don't block walkways. Unfortunately no such space has been made available for bikes. Also, parked cars just look nicer than toppled-over bicycles. Properly parked bikes don't look so bad.
I loved riding these bikes in China when I lived there because they were so convenient and you could find a free one pretty much anywhere. I hope the concept spreads, but with a reputation like this, convincing cities to allow for it will be tough.
They took the "ask for forgiveness later" strategy in China leading to this mess, but even with a few bikes showing up in cities around the globe, until they're really ubiquitous it isn't a game changer. The minor presence we see in cities like SF and Seattle is not nearly enough to feel the positive impacts of ubiquitous dockless bikeshares.
There are three separate companies that have provided bikes for this kind of business model in Seattle: Lime Bike, OFO and mobike. I ride my own bike approximately 55 miles per week, and these are my anecdotal observation:
-) A decent percentage of customers in some areas seem to be tourists. But a lot of locals use them, too.
-) There is no rhyme or reason to where customers "dump" their bikes when they are finished using them. Sometimes these can literally litter sidewalks.
-) when not in use, there are times when I ride through the city and see them all over the place to the point where they look like a spooky apocalyptic movie set. All of the people just left their bikes everywhere, but are gone.
-) Someone who works for me lives in an area in Seattle called Capitol Hill, which has very steep hills. He needed a Lime Bike to get him to downtown quickly (almost entirely down hill, sometimes steep). It was just in the nick of time halfway down the first hill when he realized someone had snipped the brake lines. He was not injured but nearly flew into traffic.
-) The tires are solid rubber: no inner tubes. Seems a brilliant idea that could spread to all bikes eventually.
It's a cool concept, but there is some sort of magic number (that doesn't seem spreadsheet-driven) on how many bikes is too many. There is supposed to be a city review at some point, which was scheduled at the beginning of these contracts, to see if thousands more bikes could be added to the city’s streets.
I feel pretty confidently that it will be rejected.
There was a spate of brake-line attacks last month (I'd call them anti-bike terrorist attacks), but the magnitude was never reported and there was no follow-up after the first announcement.
Ask your friend how many times he's rode up Capitol Hill. It's slower to bike up those steep hills than it is to walk - I've walked past bicyclists struggling to get up the hill in the past.
Locals don't really use these bikes often. They're a nice novelty. But if you need to get across the city, and your route doesn't cross the Streetcar, Trolley, or Light Rail, you're taking a bus or an Uber (or driving).
And as a former mayor found out, bicycle commutes leave you in a post-exercise state, often needing a shower or change of clothes. Rarely can you ride a bicycle for transportation and still be presentable for a business meeting.
Tubeless tires are actually an old idea (they predate the pneumatic tires). The reason they're not widespread is the ride can be extremely rough and not as efficient.
The other downside is that the additional shock gets delivered to the wheels themselves so while you don't have to replace your tubes or pump your tires up, you may have to fix your wheels more frequently.
I learned this because I thought they were pretty cool and wanted to get a low maintenance belt drive bicycle with tubeless tires, but ended up with a belt drive bicycle with pneumatic tires (Priority Continuum)
For those searching, this is not the conventional use of "tubeless" when it comes to tires - this term refers to pneumatic tires which do not use an inner tube. "Solid tire" or "solid tube" are the more common terms for airless tires and tire inserts. On off-road motorcycles they're called bib mousse, a Michelin trade term for an airless foam inner tube.
I’d like to see the city take away some street parking spaces and convert them to bike parking spaces. You can fit a lot of bikes in a parking space meant for a car.
Cities with dock bikeshare systems (like NYC’s Citibike) do exactly that.
The counter argument is that people don’t want to walk half a block extra once they get to their destination just to get to a bike parking spot. Thus, the rising popularity of dockless bike shares.
Seattle actually had a dock bikeshare for about 18 months, then scrapped it in favor of a number of dockless start-ups.
Why doesn't the government just sell these bikes to Africa? They'll maybe(?) gain a bit more value than just smelting down the bikes, it would help China's Africa ambitions, and it could make a positive difference in Africa by helping people become slightly more mobile.
And it also takes a few bikes off Chinese sidewalks and out of the trees.
What's with this attitude that the solution to issues in Africa is to dump some product on the continent? What are you solving by dumping a massive amount of unwanted, broken down bicycles? And where in Africa? Africa is a huge place.
I remember reading somewhere that so many people donated t-shirts to Africa that it devastated their local textiles industry. You can't just throw money (or garbage in this case) and expect it to magically fix underlying issues such as with infrastructure. Also, Africa isn't across the street: there are signifiant logistical issues involved.
Direct charity creates dependence. The way to solve poverty in Africa is to buy goods from people in Africa. But too many people continue to see the entire continent as incapable of providing value.
Not really: in the Congo, for example, the "highways" have deteriorated so much that bicycles are pretty much the only feasible wheeled mode of transport.
If that's the case, wouldn't it make more sense to equip them with off-road bikes with features like a suspension, larger tires, multiple gears, panniers to hold bags, and other features than to give them heavy bikes built for riding in cities with step-through frames?
I'm not saying we should start shipping Mobikes to the Congo, I'm just noting that bicycles are, in fact, quite usable without a lot of fancy infrastructure.
They'd probably have to do quite a bit of manual labor on the things without significant cooperation from the bikesharing companies, given that all of them are equipped with locks attached to the frames that can only be unlocked with the ridesharing companies' apps; and many need significant maintenance, if you've ridden these a number of them probably don't really have properly functioning brakes or messed up chains and stuff. Not to mention any brand impact that would have on these bikesharing companies. All surmountable but would stand in the way of making it a slam dunk.
That and it's not like Africa is the only impoverished place these can be helpful in. Parts of China itself, as well as many of its neighbors, are in equally perilous status economically.
The feeling I get is that the central Chinese government really wants bike sharing to succeed since it has the potential to relatively cheaply solve so many problems, from last mile transit (at least for the able-bodied) to reducing car dependence, but local Chinese governments got saddled with dealing with the chaos of it all.
My understanding is that bike-share companies in China (unlike how they operate in the US) require a deposit when you sign up for an account. Everybody dumped 100 RMB or what have you into their accounts at the outset
Meaning that starting a company like this is essentially a scheme for scamming a massive infusion of liquidity: you raise funds, collect deposits, and then you either decamp for the Bahamas, or you invest your cash in the stock market and let the bikes rot.
We were surprised, upon moving back to the US, that the bike-share companies here don't charge a deposit.
When I was in Shanghai less than a year ago ofo was giving away so many free rides that I never paid or deposited a single RMB during my entire trip. My co-workers who work there said that they don't really pay for ofo either for light usage, they keep getting weekly coupons. So it seems now they've transitioned to burning VC money at least.
The US is starting to build its own piles of abandoned and broken bicycles, now that bike-shares have reached the US. Interestingly, most of the bike share companies are backed by Chinese companies that have the relevant experience.
Mobike apparently has a factory that can produce 50,000 bikes per day. They can easily flood a US/EU city with bikes just with a day's production. Transporting a container full of bikes via ship is cheap so I don't think they produce anything locally.
Those pictures made me think that those were just inviting some organism to move into a new niche based upon bicycle predation or bicycle parasitism.
And sure enough, if you look closely enough, you can see the bike mold creeping up to cover the old, weak, and sickly bicycles that can no longer keep up with the herd.
No we don't. We need better bikepaths, separate from cars, covered from the elements, multi-lane, safe and secure, extensive routes.
I have promoted the idea of building a network of bikepaths over the train lines here in Brisbane. Goes everywhere the train does, with entry and exits at trains stations.
Oh man that’d be fantastic. Though I don’t know how it’d work through Central. I used to ride from the Valley to Red Hill for work every day, and even that felt too sketchy, which is sad :( I love Brisbane, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.
I'm sure engineers can figure that out, but I am thinking as soon as you'd hit Roma Street from either direction the path should go along the North and South Banks of the river.
Raised platforms in the city, say over Adelaide Street and Elizabeth Street along one way, and over Edward Street and George Street the other way, would be amazing. Just imagine.
I live in Nundah and work in Edward Street. Biking down Sandgate Road, Nudgee Road or Gympie Road in peak hour is suicidal. Back roads are not much better.
Shared bicycles have some advantages over own ones:
- if you own a bike, you need a space in your apartment to keep it. Of course, if you have your own house, it is not a problem (but you have lot of other problems like no public transportation around), but in cities like Moscow or Beijing most people live in relatively small apartments and some of them rent only a single room. And usually you cannot park your bicycle outside.
- in many cities you can ride a bicycle only 7-8 months a year because it is cold in winter.
- you don't care if it gets stolen.
- you cannot get on a bus or a subway train with a bicycle. With a shared bicycle you can leave it near the station and take a new one on another station.
- a new bicycle can cost about $100-200, and a shared one can cost around $10-20 per month.
"you cannot get on a bus or a subway train with a bicycle."
Most European cities allow that. There may be some restrictions. I.e. Limited to certain cars, or banned during rush hours and, dependent on the city, you may have to buy a ticket for your bike.
But seeing bikes in buses, subways, or trams is perfectly normal in most European cities.
Piling things up on public space requires some infrastructure and regulation.
edit: your question is akin to asking, "Why are people starving when our farmers are so productive, and the average restaurant/grocery throws out tons of spoiled food annually?". The problem is not purely one of lack of quantity.
As well as having proper roads to bike them on, most of America has pretty lame bike infrastructure generally.
Separately, your 22-year-old probably steel-frame bike is probably built a lot better than the average cheap aluminum ones these days, and you've probably taken good enough care of it that it doesn't have a broken or badly bent frame. We're a wasteful people.
Here's one problem: some places will be more popular for pickups and some places will be more popular for drop-offs. Who is going to move the bikes around to balance this?
Something I've thought about is to offer a modest reward for taking a bike from A to B, where the endpoints are determined by algorithm, or there are specified drop off points. This could be a form of income for the otherwise unemployable.
Likewise, litter of bottles and cans went way down in my home state when they created a 10 cent deposit.
In the Lime Bike app, some bike pins glow and if you ride them for more than 5 minutes you get a coupon. I assume they apply the incentive to areas with high density to encourage spreading the bikes out.
Why is that so? If people in a city move from their house to the downtown or to the nearest subway station, they will return the bicycle on their way back.
Picture a shopping mile with a train station at one end. Many people will arrive by train, do their shopping and then want to return to the train station to get back home.
You can also reduce the number of bikes needed by doing timed redistributions. Two people in the same appartment building, one leaves for work around 7 while the other leaves around 9, can share a bike if someone brings it from the nearest subway station to the local bike station at 8.
What an absolute waste of resources. We should get these bikes to people with real need - imagine what this would mean for a family who need to walk for hours for water or education.
But nobody's going to develop bike technology unless there's profit to be had. Best case, bike production becomes orders of magnitude cheaper due to all the investment and it becomes more effective to donate old/decommissioned bikes to those in need.
A Singapore company, O-Bike, dumped several hundred of those bikes in Zurich.
If I've seen half a dozen of them in use that's probably aiming high. Granted, that was in the last half year, when it was winter, but still.
You just see them rot away with broken parts torn off, decaying.
The bikes are of such shitty quality (an expert on bikes estimated a price of $50, max, for the parts) and are so heinously ugly that people wouldn't take them for free. Let alone buy them at auction.
The image where a person is walking on a stack of them getting some rope. The image where a person bikes by a tall stack of bikes. For a lot of the properly parked ones, I assume you are right.
He's not just getting some rope - he's untangling the rope that bundled these bicycles, when they were lowered into place. The rope was attached to a crane. You can see that crane in the picture - he's actively working on the storage site.
Yes, I imagine that may damage some of the bicycles. It's still much cheaper then alternative means of storage. It's just the cost of dealing with industrial quantities of goods - your local big box stores lose or damage some of their merchandise all the time, for similar reasons.
Because donating regularly destroys local industries. Donations of food and clothes to Africa have contributed to the destruction of local companies, leaving the countries dependent on foreign aid.
You could sell broken ones for a low price to companies in developing countries so that they can repair them for sale.
This is a misleading story. The photographs of the bike piles are not abandoned bicycles - they are storage stockpiles from a bankrupt company awaiting liquidation.
That's not true, there were tons of Mobike and Ofo bikes there, both of which are very well funded and active corporations at the moment. There are some minor incorrect statements—Didi isn't just a bike-sharing company, but they're the Chinese equivalent of Uber, the largest ridesharing company in the world, and 2nd largest e-commerce company in China—but what the article does lack is context on how things got to this point.
This shows the problem with capitalism's winner-takes-all ethic. In America the piles of old bikes are not built by corporations, but by mom-and-pop chop-shops and self-employed bike thieves, under the benevolent watch of the local police. Clearly that is a far more sustainable approach to bike sharing, and the role of local (organic?) bike thieves and fences helps keep the benefits in the community, instead of sucking up all the profits to monocle-wearing capitalists in far-off cities.
I hate to tell you this, but there are like four of these companies in Seattle now, there was a story about companies doing this same model in San Francisco except with electric scooters that people are bitching about clogging up the sidewalks; Seattle has been working with the bikeshare companies so maybe they won't end up with massive junkyards of bikes after the bikeshare #12 learns the hard way that there is only room for three bikeshare companies in one city, but I know the SF scooter companies are completely unlicensed.
> the bikeshare #12 learns the hard way that there is only room for three bikeshare companies in one city
Their business model isn't about getting people to use the shared bikes for a small fee. It's about getting people to pay the initial deposit for the right to easily use the bikes. There's room for more than 3 bikeshare companies doing this. By creating an oversupply from funds invested in their capital account, the company can create the illusion of having many bikes available. As soon as someone experiences even a minor problem with finding a bike from their current bikeshare company, they may sign up with and pay the deposit to another company. Although a company in theory puts the deposit into a special account and returns it to the customer on demand, in practise they don't if they go bankrupt and the deposits have already been skimmed.
I experienced this trying to sign up with Mobike as a foreigner in China. After taking a 299 rmb deposit from my bank account, their app presented a screen accepting Chinese citizen ID numbers only. I couldn't find a menu option anywhere for retrieving my deposit money. What is the deposit amount for those bikeshare companies in Seattle?
Really? I was using Mobike as a foreigner in China for a while and I don't recall them asking for a 身份证 or anything (did they ask for my passport number? I don't think they did), plus they have a pretty well-translated app and already operate in other English speaking markets including the USA and Singapore. For Mobike and Ofo they should be flush with enough money that the likelihood of them shutting down all of a sudden is relatively unlikely, but just in case when I left China I did get my deposit refunded fine.
I tried signing up one week ago. Perhaps they've changed since you were there. I used their service in WeChat linked to WeChatPay to sign up and pay the deposit, after which I hit the "enter your ID card number" snag. I also tried downloading the app on their website but it doesn't run on my phone (running Android 4.4.4) which I bought in China.
Edit: I still maintain an integral part of the business model of smaller bikesharing companies is collecting the deposits and using the money for other things.
