The ultimate guide to bike-sharing and the future of “China to Global” exports

medium.com

13 points·spenceryang··6 comments

After just returning from China, I can vouch for the fact that they are not exaggerating when they say the cities are literally being buried in bikes. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bikes on almost every major intersection and street corner. Some cities have 3-4 bike sharing companies dumping bikes everywhere they can. It's very convenient for the users, but only if you have some way to pay, which is very difficult for visitors without a Chinese phone number or a source of WeChat funds.

Just walk around where there are a ton of bikes and you will find one unlocked

Being able to leave your bike anywhere makes bike sharing so much more compelling.

How does maintenance work with this model. Paris has had bike sharing for a long time. The advantage of having the bikes in one location is if one bike had an issue you could use another. Also maintenance crews had to only visit a limited number of locations.

In 2-3 years time will the bikes deteriorate such that they will not be nice to ride?

Maintenance is not an issue if bike-sharing becomes a non-viable business.

One of the scam bike-sharing business models are to make money on deposits, raise money from investors, and bounce.

So the Chinese government is looking at forcing these companies to place deposits into reserve accounts, instead of letting them declare as revenue to attract investors.

I can vouch that here in the US, there are companies that track where a bike is locked/unlocked. This data is mapped and fed to a rebalancing team which can wrangle strays. In addition, paying a premium for not locking up next to a station can help steer correct behavior.

"There are nine million bicycles in Beijing"

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHQG6-DojVw

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