How 'dockless' cycles flooded China and are heading overseas | Hacker News Reader

How 'dockless' cycles flooded China and are heading overseas

theguardian.com

81 pointsoska74 comments

They used to have these on the Georgia Tech campus. The company was called viaCycle[1]; IIRC they have now shut down.

I borrowed one of the bikes once. Because all the tracking infrastructure and battery for the electronics were all on the bike (at least I think that's how the tech worked) the bike was quite heavy. At least I think that is the reason it was heavy. Not very fun to ride at all. I'll also confess I wasn't in great shape at the time. I liked the concept though and I really wanted it to work out for them.

I'm a bit skeptical of bike share programs unless they're in high-density areas. The already-existing Bay Area Bikeshare is really expensive unless you're making <60-minute trips between 2 docking stations. I haven't tried any of the bikes but they look much heavier than the average $300 hybrid bike. Being out all the time can't be good for keeping them in top condition.

[1] http://www.viacycle.com/howitworks/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/smart-bike-sharing-startup-is...

They're also deliberately heavy to make them harder and less attractive to steal. Not an issue in a flat city, but much less fun on hills.

Hopefully in the long run electric assist is practical to implement on these bikes which should ameliorate their weight.

Barcelona has electrical assisted (docking) bikes.

Tokyo too

I imagine most of the weight is from the frame. Lightweight materials tend to be more expensive than their heavier (and more durable) counterparts for these sorts of things.

The weight serves two purposes:

* Makes them less attractive to steal and ride at high speeds

* Makes them a lot more durable than a lightweight racing bike

This has been a fun blast from the past. viaCycle was in YC (S12). And yes, we shut down in 2013 around 3 years in.

Hey, I would love to hear more about your experience, would you be free for a quick chat ?

They are heavy because they need to be extremely sturdy. That said, weight isn't too much of a problem. They may be 4kg heavier than your fixie, but in return they tend to run extremely smooth because of the high quality components. The constant usage is actually a positive factor constant usage and good service. Compared to the bikes I see friends using, they are without a doubt more fun to ride. No grinding noises, extremely bright lights that actually work, tires at the right pressure etc.

> They are heavy because they need to be extremely sturdy.

That makes sense.

> That said, weight isn't too much of a problem.

This I would dispute. The way I see it there are two main consumers of bikeshares in the beginning (before the system hits critical mass and ubiquity):

1. People who don't own bikes, aren't regular cyclists

2. Cyclists who are visiting the area and didn't/couldn't bring their own bike with them

Of those, 1 is likely to be the majority. When I tried viaCycle, I was in category 1. I was also in terrible shape (as some non-cyclists are also). When you're in that demographic, a few extra kilos in bike weight (plus hills) makes a massive difference to how the ride _feels_ and how likely you are to try it again.

Overall I wonder whether, instead of promoting bikeshares, cities should try and foster a biking culture and make it easier to ride everywhere. Examples:

1. Mandate minimum amounts of bike parking for businesses (I don't know if any cities already do this), as they already do for car parking

2. Mandate minimum levels of convenience for bike parking at businesses. Eg. Valley Fair Mall in San Jose/Santa Clara has maybe 2 or 3 tiny bike parking stands, sometimes hidden away inside the car parking structures. Which means you're in for a long walk after locking your bike. It doesn't have to be like that. I understand that bike stands might be demand-driven; i.e they aren't installed because customers don't demand them. But it could very well be a chicken-and-egg problem and it doesn't cost much to find out.

3. Make street bike parking and locking safer (I'll admit I don't have any ideas for how to do this)

4. Make it easier to bring bikes onto public transport - This one is admittedly a tough sell in places with already-crowded public transport; but in most places like that you probably have the critical density needed for a successful bikeshare program. OTOH it could also increase public transport ridership in places that don't have that much population density.

5. Bike lanes with barriers - drivers hate them but if a city is determined to get more people biking, this could help. Many would-be cyclists are skittish about sharing the road with huge pickup trucks and texting drivers.

6. During the planning approval process (or whatever it's called) for new buildings, take into account pedestrian/bike accessibility. Eg. Buildings or complexes that are built on corner lots and only have parking lot entrances on either street side built for cars, but no pedestrian/bike entrance on the corner. Pedestrians/cyclists have to walk/ride all the way around to one of the car entrances or hop a fence/hedge or something. In theory it shouldn't even be hard for most existing parking lots on corners to add a small pedestrian/bike entrance.

EDIT: formatting

Here are a couple of good article on the effect these startups have had in China:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2017/01/24/shanghais...

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2017/02/22/ofo-renta...

Expect to see piles and piles of unused bikes littering the streets.

Another poster was worried about theft, when the market is saturated by venture-backed bicycles a greater problem for most people will be lack of theft.

Oh the humanity. Seriously though those scenes seem fine except for the one with the big pile of bikes. That is avoided by having a credit card on file and charging the user who couldn't be bothered to lock the bike when he was done.

The benefits include less vehicle and transit congestion and all the health that comes with exercise.

"That is avoided by having a credit card on file and charging the user who couldn't be bothered to lock the bike when he was done."

The bikes are locked only to themselves, not to a railing. So even a locked bike can easily be loaded onto a truck if the city decides it's cluttering up the place.

Exactly. The whole point of these bikes is that they aren't docked to anything and can be left anywhere.

You can happily leave the bike parked correctly and in good condition, but there's nothing to stop a random stranger/group of drunk students making piles of bikes for shits and giggles.

I wonder if a simple alarm system based on movement would help deter the nuisance behaviour. It has GPS, so you could set an allowed range so people could still move them a few meters if, for example, the bikes are blocking their entrance.

Nope. Some of them have movement alarms. No one cares.

I don't quite get it, since regular bikes are parked like that where I live, legally. I haven't seen piles yet.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/17/chinese-discar...

When you park your own bike, even a cheap one, you are somewhat careful about where you park it, because if someone knocks it over or moves it, it affects you directly.

The same is not true of a Mobike or Ofo, so people are more likely to park inconsiderately (e.g. blocking the blind person's path, or the whole width of a narrow pavement).

I was pushing a stroller recently and had to move off the pavement onto the road, to avoid a line of dockless rental bikes that were blocking my intended path.

Thanks, that's a good example.

> e.g. blocking the blind person's path

To be fair, the braille paths in China aren't exactly blind-friendly in the first place:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1299761/beiji...

You're correct about the benefits, but wrong about the downsides.

The bikes lock to themselves, and they explain in the article that they are already using a behavior system to reward people for good behavior and punishing users who abuse the system.

(although this doesn't prevent sanitation workers from creating bike piles to clear walkways and footpaths where the bikes are often discarded)

The second biggest problem, as the article mentions, is the fact that with bikes scattered everywhere and no real organizational system, that all of the bikes fall into disrepair and the majority are not properly maintained.

We've had them Berlin for something like ten years, with a break in between where the provider switched to a station-based model. There have never been any piles.

The bikes they use are incredibly sturdy and probably cost around $1000, so it's really not in their interest to let them go to waste.

With a floating model, you do run into the problem that usage pattern tend to distribute the bikes unevenly – people are more likely to choose the bike for the way back because either they're drunk and think it'd be fun, or public transport takes to long at night, or just because you're in a better mood after a busy day than just after getting up in the morning.

That means you do need teams to redistribute bikes, and that may sink your business model. But any data-driven organisation will seize to operate a system dysfunctional enough to have more than 15 bikes at the same street corner.

The problem is caused by a) the no docking station model b) multiple venture capital backed firms competing for marketshare and c) cheap bicycles.

Has Berlin had those 3 factors at play for the last 10 years? If not, that is why there is no problem with piles.

All those things are in play in China, and the companies doing it are looking to expand overseas.

Don't get me wrong, public bike systems are great, but care needs to taken with how they are implemented.

All of those pictures - except the one with the pile of tangled bikes - look like a very, very calm day in the Netherlands :)

There is a PR explosion of these stories at the moment (e.g. [1]). So I thought I'd give it a try here in Singapore.

Neither Mobike nor Ofo were installable on my Xiaomi ("not available in your market" - maybe they should have unlocked the app before the press release!), so I went with the "local" option of Obike (actually a HK outfit).

The interesting part were rules clearly designed to curb certain undesirable behaviour. You get docked points for things like parking the bike somewhere private, and losing half your initial points increases the 15 minute rate from $0.5 to $50. You gain points for rides and reporting broken or missing bikes.

The first 7 bike locations I checked had no bikes (including 2 locations sandwiched between 4 universities). I reported the last 5 and heard nothing from customer service (also, did not earn any points). I decided to try clusters instead and lo and behold, finally some bikes. The rest worked fine as expected, presumably because it does not involve humans, although my parked bike had moved 137m when I checked the map 5 minutes later - clearly there are teething tracking issues.

It seems that people are taking the bikes home and not getting penalised for it, perhaps due to a desire for higher usage numbers for investors. Absent customer service also indicates a swamped team.

Someone on Facebook pointed out that the Ofo bikes use a number code which does not change, and some users claimed to have taken the Ofo home after their first ride and used it for free thereafter.

Still, this is a great idea which works relatively well. I wish the best to these companies.

[1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2080837/chinas-m...

"Someone on Facebook pointed out that the Ofo bikes use a number code which does not change, and some users claimed to have taken the Ofo home after their first ride and used it for free thereafter."

There are a lot of these 'stolen' Ofo bikes in Beijing. They usually have an additional regular lock to prevent other Ofo users from unlocking them using the code (which the app will provide, so long as the bike isn't reported as currently being used).

I read about it on one of the other commenters' links and immediately thought that somewhere, a product manager was told to "move fast and break things" and "get it launched next month no matter what".

They are just scratching off the number and the QR code so no-one can use them.

My only experience with this sort of thing was in Paris and it was very fun being able to ride around Paris, but in the end it was a complete pain.

My travel credit card had 200 euros put on hold, twice (two bikes). Which didn't clear up for about a week. We hired bikes twice, so I had 800 euros in limbo while travelling.

Not sure if this is a fault of the hiring system (not refunding or clearing the block quicker) - or my bank (not recognizing the clearing or block earlier).

Anyway as a tourist this was a huge inconvenience... hopefully we come up with better ways to address this.

I just realised this is not really a helpful comment, but just some personal context to hiring bikes :)

I think they keep the hold for a few days after your usage expires, so if somebody reports the bike as damaged they can still charge you.

I don't think with our current financial system (i.e. credit cards), there is really a much better way.

My city in Germany, Karlsruhe, has had dockless cycle rental and it works great, despite what the armchair experts in this thread say about how this could never work in the Western World. It's 1€ per 30 minutes, 9€ for the day, or 48€ per year for unlimited 30 minute trips. Since 30 minutes suffice to get just about anywhere in the city it's basically unlimited use, and you can just drop off your bike and take the next one a few minutes later if you do get close to the limit.

Still available in 11 cities such as Berlin, Munich, and Cologne. [1] Not sure if their are any competing providers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_Bike

Karlsruhe switched to Nextbike, their solution is less high-tech but works fine, too.

I wonder what the actual economics of a business like this are?

What are the real rental rates at which these companies make a profit? Because at $0.15 an hour it seems like well below what the cost of running the service might be. (also including the cost of buying and maintaining the bikes)

To what degree does the business model rely on becoming the dominant player?

What is the scale you have to reach to be profitable at $0.15 an hour? How many bikes do you need and how many trips need to be taken?

From what I understand about the habits of people with the nyc bike share program, the movement of bikes needs a lot of human intervention to remain effective, and the bike locations balanced. Are they just hoping that the pure density of bikes in the system helps them overcome this? I would think that manual rebalancing of the system is quite costly. (A driver has to track the bike down via GPS and pick it up, vs. a dock system where the drivers know where to find the bikes)

It sounds like they don't do too much maintenance on the bikes, so that cost is probably fairly low. And I wonder if bikes would need to be rebalanced manually? Presumably with enough bikes in the system, the bikes would be distributed around population centers pretty well.

Perhaps the economics are buy really cheap bikes and hope on average they are ridden for enough hours to cover the cost before they end up broken / lost / stolen.

Perhaps you can charge more for moving bikes in the "wrong" direction - i.e. if bikes always end up in manhattan then if you bike to brooklyn from manhattan it's cheaper than vice versa?

In the Dutch bike-share system OV-fiets, a bike costs €3.65 per day, so that it similar. It is subsidized though (but I don't know how that works out percentage-wise). On the other hand, things are still a little cheaper in China, I think.

That's quite expensive. In Barcelona the scheme is a fixed €47 subscription per year though you can only use the bike for 30 mins per ride (after that there's a surcharge).

A similar scheme just opened here in Helsinki. The cost is €25 for a year, with each of your journeys being free if it lasts for <30 minutes:

https://www.hsl.fi/en/citybikes

To be honest Helsinki has such excellent transport infrastructure (bus + tram) that I've never been tempted to sign up for the bike scheme (as I have my own already).

OV-fiets is 3.85 euro for 24h though, and no yearly fee. That's a whole different use case than a short ride within a city from one bike parking to the next. I'm sure the surcharges in Barcelona would add up to more if you kept it 24h.

I suppose higher wages in Holland play a role, but mostly the system is just very different from Barcelona (or at least what I remember from being there a few times a few years ago).

The OV-fiets is a bike you get at a train station (maybe some metro stations too; not sure), and typically you'll use it to get from there to your destination and then back to the train station.

The system in Barcelona (and most other cities too, I think) is more about getting from A to B in the city and there are pick-up / drop-off points around the city.

In the former scenario charging by day makes a lot more sense, I guess. There's 1.3 bikes or so per Dutch person, so few people would have use for a Barcelona-style approach.

It's similar with these car sharing services. The on we have across cities is a bit like the OV-fiets: you pick a car up at a designated parking spot and return it to the same spot, often as a 'supplement' to your longer-distance public transport. Only in Amsterdam (AFAIK) we also have companies that allow you to pick up a car nearby and leave it anywhere at your destination.

Seeing those piles of abandoned bicycles reminded me of an episode from American history, the great railroad over-building of the late 1800s.

The Civil War had been an explosive period of industrial growth, and when it was over there was a lot of new capital sloshing around looking for someplace to go. Lots of it ended up going into the hot new transportation technology of the time, railroads, which led to a race between rail operators to grow as fast as possible in hopes of seizing a dominant market position and using it to muscle their competitors out of business. (A business plan which will be familiar to folks in the startup world.)

All of which resulted in an absolutely enormous amount of track being laid, something like 200,000 miles between 1860 and 1915; which turned out to be much more rail capacity than anybody actually needed, even when rail was at its most economically relevant. But all that growth meant that the railroad sector had become the biggest employer of Americans outside farming, so the deflation of the rail bubble led to the original "Great Depression" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression) and labor turmoil more severe than anything any living American has experienced.[1]

I look at all those bikes, all also built by speculative capital, and wonder: how many bubbles are waiting to pop in China? And what will happen when they do?

[1] Such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877) and the Pullman Strike of 1894 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike).

IMHO there are four bubbles popping in China: urbanization, real estate, automobiles and education.

The company behind Copenhagen's docked bikes has gone bankrupt [0].

In a city where it's inexpensive to hire a standard city bike from a shop, the scheme decided to go for expensive electric cycles with GPS map displays.

[0] http://cphpost.dk/news/business/company-behind-copenhagens-c...

Docks make no sense in Copenhagen, where most everyone knows how to properly park their wheel-locked bikes in a non-intrusive way.

Also, most people have their own bikes.

There is a version of this in the automobile space - Car2Go - in a bunch of US cities. I used this a few times in Miami where they had Smart FourTwo's scattered across the city. As a member, you could walk up, unlock it and drive it anywhere. Once at your destination you'd just park it at any public Miami parking lot. Too bad the service is no longer in Miami - it was pretty awesome.

There is a similar scooter-based startup in SF called Scoot. There are official docking spaces with chargers in a number of garages but you can also leave them in the street within designated zones within quite a large portion of the city - they're marked in blue on the vehicle map [0].

Being able to go point-to-point and not having to think about paying for the time you're at your destination is very convenient.

They added a pilot program with a handful of mini two-person electri "quad" cars as well. Seems to be a partnership with Nissan. I haven't gotten to try out any of those yet, they are not usually available when I've checked.

0: https://scoot.co/locations/

Car2Go is quite popular in Amsterdam, several friends use it as their main mode of transport for rainy days / long distance. Being able to park them for free, in a city where parking is extremely limited and expensive, is a big plus.

Does anyone know how these work technically? Does the bike have a mobile data connection, or does the app give you a code to unlock the bike?

How does the economics of it work? What does it cost to manufacture a dockless bike, and can they reasonably make it back in fees. Or is this all fueled by VC money?

I'm pretty sure they're all embedded low-power processors with GSM + SMS unlocking and small simple batteries which recharge when cycled. (There is a visible delay between people scanning the codes and the locks releasing.)

GPS is usually not included, instead it uses the GPS location of the phone of the last person who hired it and reported locking it when done. ("Sometimes users search for a bike and it is not where their smartphone says it is")

For a redesign, it would be theoretically possible to do the unlock from the consumer app via wifi, bluetooth or NFC and eliminate the mobile connection entirely, using an embedded cryptographic approach similar to banking devices.

Yes, it's all VC money.

I'm not sure how well this would work out in the US. Any standard parts would be stripped off those things instantly. Have you ever seen what happens to a bike after being locked somewhere for more than a couple days? It disappears piece by piece until nothing but the frame is left.

It's the unfortunate thing about the US. Although I don't think it's impossible, having any decent quality bike would definitely get stripped like you said. The only way I can imagine this being implemented is if there are bike lockers that completely enclose the bike. Unfortunately, that would raise the cost of the rentals to probably more than people are willing to pay.

There are plenty of bikeshares in the US -- the bikes are just built to be nearly theft-proof.

I've seen several bike shares in the US in tourist areas and they were all awfully expensive (I want to say something like $5/hour or ~$15 for the day?). They also required you to park at one of the docking stations which wasn't too bad because they had them near the tourist spots. Having the freedom of China's seems a little farfetched for the US in my opinion.

based off of related comments in here, it seems like the freedom isn't really working in China either...

I think $10 a day is reasonable if you're moving around. It's a bit more than a movie ticket, and if you rent in the morning you get a full day's usage.

Though to be honest I don't know many US cities that would be fun on a bike...

Most of these bike-share services aren't really meant for fun all-day rides. In fact, most of them limit you to 30-45 minutes before you have to return the bike to a dock. The hope is that these short 1-2 mile rides replace car trips and extends the territory covered by a bus or metro line.

This is actually how it works with Breeze bike share in Santa Monica:

$99/year membership

Includes 90 minutes free ride time each day ($7/hr after that)

Many well-placed pods, but can leave anywhere in the city for a $2 fee

The US has a per-capita GDP is close to 5x higher then Chinas. Why would theft be exclusive to the US instead of China?

Many reasons.. but it ultimately comes to one thing, Cops do not give hoot to bike theft, so the rist-reward in bike theft is favorable.

So no different from China then?

Can you speak to how much the authorities in China care about bike theft?

Cannot comment about China, but again from anectodal personal experience in India, the component of street justice in some places cannot be totally ruled out.

If you are caught by a mob while stealing .. brace for Impact!

edit: The broader point being "risk" component of theft in certain places is sometimes inhibitive in spite of apathy from authorities.

The authorities in China care nothing about bike theft.

The best theft-prevention mechanism in China is to have an old, rusty, broken looking bike.

In the case of the US per capita GDP just means that we are a country containing many rich people, not a rich country. Income inequality is extreme. When the government or private industry refuses to redistribute money downward, poor people will just take it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

According to the "Gini coefficient" wealth inequality is actually slightly higher in China. Any other theories?

That depends on whose figures you use. According to the CIA, income inequality is higher in the U.S. That's also a figure for the entire country, not within the cities where these bike share companies operate, and I would guess that there's a much more stark divide between rich and poor in American cities.

The CIA gini coefficient is slightly higher for the US, a few percentage points, while the World Bank Gini coefficient is slightly higher for China. Your conjecture about the starker divide between rich and poor in US cities is just that, conjecture. I could guess the same about Chinese cities.

So we have no evidence yet that China has less income inequality than the US. Which makes it a very unconvincing reason for differences in crime.

I can't talk about China, but this scheme would probably work in a lot of places in Japan. I used to ride my ~$700 hybrid bike to the train station a lot. At first I locked it, but then I noticed that mine was the only locked bike. I ended up leaving it unlocked. Kept that up for 5 years or so and my bike never got stolen (admittedly I live in the country side -- not sure how successful that would be in a big city).

When I lived in the UK and Canada, I would never dream of leaving my bike unlocked. Even locked, I've had bikes stolen. Once, I locked my bike to a bike rack and they stole the whole bike rack (must have been a chore!). Most of the time, they will deflate your tyres in hopes that you leave the bike there overnight so that they will have some time to cut off the lock in peace.

Anyway, it's just cultural. I suspect that's hard to believe (it would have been hard for me to believe before I left Canada). In each culture there's a lot of stuff that's good and a lot of stuff that's not so good. People really do behave differently, but I've travelled enough to know that one culture isn't really appreciably better than another -- just different.

Because a lot more things affect crime than just socio-economic status.

Unless you have a national identity tracking system and register with every mobile phone, which in China's case, it does. If someone steal the bike, they will be sorted out immediately.

Would there be a black market for bicycle parts if you could pick a bike up off the street and ride it for next to nothing? What would be the price of a nut or half a chain or a handlebar handle in a market where there are so many bicycles? Why commit a crime to purchase a bicycle, when they can apparently be shipped to your city assembled for about 50 bucks?

I think what you meant to say was, "That would never work in my city".

We don't all live in the ghetto.

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