As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong with Us? | Hacker News Reader

As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong with Us?

nytimes.com

108 pointsKKKKkkkk1100 comments

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.

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.

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.

I largely concur. I think the bike parking zones pre-date the bike sharing startups but they've been expanded and get more use now. Unfortunately there are plenty of people who leave the bikes in their compounds but as problems go that's pretty small and will become even less of a problem once they decide to ramp up enforcement over growth.

If the NYT wanted to run a piece about Chinese manners and consideration they could have found a better subject for a hit piece easily.

Shanghai ain't China, heck I've been Beijinger for many years and even I was shocked when i went there for business trip to see people waiting for green light at junction.

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.

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.

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.

In the US, the majority of streets have at least a lane of space taken up by parking. If half of that was offered to bikes there wouldn't be any bike parking issues.

It's the same in biger cities in France, Eastern Europe, even in Germany, although the Germans are better behaved probably because of huge fines.

In Germany the fines for parking where you aren't allowed to park are something like 10 €, probably much lower than the European average.

In some cases it does not impede public right of way; but it has a much deeper, longer term, insidious cost.

https://youtu.be/Akm7ik-H_7U

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

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.

> 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.

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.

To average 40 you'd have to live somewhere quite flat I suspect.

Or more likely downhill.

To add a data point:

I cycle to work daily (22km) and have cycled pretty much all my life since. Sustaining 40km/h for longer periods is unrealistic if 1.) your terrain is not completely flat; 2.) there is wind; 3.) you do not want to get to your destination soaked with sweat; 4.) you have to carry some luggage like a laptop; or 5.) you cannot use a touring bike because of the terrain.

I sometimes cycle with a GPS and have Pedelecs (limited to 25km/h for electrical support in Germany) as a reference point. The vast majority of cyclers that I encounter cycle less than 25km/h under normal conditions [1]. Probably somewhere between 20 and 25. If there is strong wind or uphill, it's definitely less than that.

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.

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.

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.

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/ 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.

I haven't owned a bicycle since I have been able to drive a car, so my estimation may be wildly inaccurate. I grew up in a distant suburban/rural area in the Seattle region, where the nearest stores are 15 minutes away at 45mph.

These are mostly 2-lane country roads, with 6 foot drainage ditches on the sides on the roads instead of sidewalks, and sometimes even large delivery semi trucks drive these. You'd have to be crazy to ride a bicycle on such a hostile road. I did so twice and my mother refused to let me bicycle to work, insisting I use my father's car.

I occasionally drive up by Point Reyes in California, and on the weekends, Highway 1 near there is a popular cycling route—packs of Lycra-clad cyclists along a narrow 2-lane, winding road with hills on one side and a short cliff to the ocean on the other. You definitely have to be careful passing them, but given that the news is not routinely filled with headlines of "another cyclist plowed down on Hwy 1", I'd disagree with your assessment that you'd have to be crazy to do it.

>packs of Lycra-clad cyclists

There is a huge difference in both perceived and actual safety between being part of a large group of bicyclists that occupies a significant fraction of the lane and being a lone bicyclist going along the verge of the road while cars and trucks pass you at 65 mph.

Similar to schools of fish, and maybe flocks of smaller birds.

I think he was referring to the bit of the article where it said bicycles were "haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks" rather than bikes being ridden.

Isn't the road and foot path a public right of way? Is there anything rivalling cars in terms of public space taken up by private property?

> Space taken by car-parking is typically in dedicated parking lots: out of the way and doesn't impede public rights-of-way

In some developed cities, but in most of China cars are usually parked on the sidewalks. When they're angle-parked along the full width of the sidewalk, pedestrians need to drop onto the roadside to continue walking.

Almost all services are now about $0.07USD/hour, or less and, even better, free on the weekends.

Having just come back from living in Shanghai for some time, nothing makes it more convenient than not having to think about the price.

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.

I saw an adult riding one in the suburbs yesterday. Really weird to see an adult riding a bike without the full spandex gear.

Why?

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.

In the somewhat hilly Madrid, the system is of electric bikes.

In Paris, if you leave the bike in Montmartre (high hill) they give more time in your hide.

> In Paris, if you leave the bike in Montmartre (high hill) they give more time in your hide.

This incentive seems to have little to no effect. Bike stations on top of the Paris hills (Montmartre, Belleville, Pantheon, ..) are almost always completely empty.

It's not a huge issue in Paris as the city is mostly flat and you can walk down the hills within 5 minutes usually, finding a bike. The same system would fail miserably in a in a predominantly hilly city such as SF.

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.

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

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

Airport luggage carts

They do have people manually re-balancing the stations (I've seen them loading up a trailer with dozens of bikes around 2nd and Brannan). How often they do the re-balancing right now, however, that I don't know.

We have a system here in Hamilton Ontario where the bikes require a credit card to access and they include a cellphone/GPS system built into the bike so every bike knows its current location. That seems to reduce the abuse.

> bikes require a credit card to access

Many people don't have credit cards (though my information on that is years old; perhaps it's changed?). Doesn't that policy limit access for the people who might need the bikes most?

There's a bit more flexibility on this front with prepaid cards and loadable cards from banks. You can get Visa gift cards in the checkout aisle at most stores which work for most credit card requirements.

It's not super convenient but it does allow for people without bank accounts or good credit to participate.

Debit cards and gift cards carry the same branding as and look similar to credit cards, but don't provide many of the same functions. For example, it can be hard to rent a car using a debit card.

A credit card means that the issuer vouches for and will (effectively) underwrite your credit. A debit card means that Visa will process payment if there is sufficient money in your account.

An important question is whether debit cards can be used to rent the bikes, or if the vendors want assurance for liability in addition to immediate payment.

Canadian debit cards run on the Interac system. Generally, they have neither Visa nor Mastercard logos and different numbers. Some don't even have expiration dates because of chip & PIN. This is changing with some banks offering debit cards that can be used online through the credit card networks.

Canadian debit cards would generally not be accepted if they're asking for Visa/Mastercard/Amex.

Ontario has heavy credit card coverage as I understand it, and the city runs a charity that handles giving access to the bikeshare system for those who need help. The idea is that the charity will also absorb the liability of providing access to people are less traceable than credit card holders.

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.

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.

Hamburg has these bikes too, since about 5 years or so. They have an App to unlock the bikes from a station. These stations are everywhere. It's such a nice addition to public transportation! And it's free for 30min, which is enough for most rides.

There was a gratis bicycle plan in Amsterdam in 1965 ('witte fietsenplan'):

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/26/story-cities-...

Interestingly enough 'The free white bikes were quickly removed by the police, who were hostile to Provo’s anarchist initiatives. '

Also, apparently, they had a small-scale electric car-sharing system in 1974.

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

https://vulcanpost.com/608463/bike-sharing-singapore/

Are you from the UK? It's usually munters who cause problems in NZ and Australia.

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.

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!

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.

What's unsustainable about cheap bikes?

The cost of maintenance is one. The other is getting back bikes that have been misplaced due to bad behaviour.

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.

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

At $0.07/hour, with a bike cost of $80, the bike needs to be taken on 1,200 hour-long trips to recoup its investment. That's possible, but not in a city with 1 hire bike for every 16 people.

And this isn't even considering the bike repair, lost/vandalised/taken apart bikes, trucks needed to move the bikes when people's trips don't balance the bikes out (e.g. people riding public transport uphill and bikes downhill).

Even most publicly funded bike shares don't make a profit. They bring benefits to their city in reduced pollution and traffic, and increased health and enjoyment. None of which will show up on a start-up's balance sheet.

I think theyre just too expensive right now. So in the us the case for an 8 dollar a day rental or more is slim

I think theyre just too expensive right now. So in the us the case for an 8 dollar a day rental or more is not convincing in terms of affordability.

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."

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?

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...

Just in case, previous NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing-bike-s...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

"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...

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.

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... (page 109)

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.

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.

Mobike != government system.

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

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.

There's a ¥300 deposit to get started with Mobike. You can get kicked from the service and lose your deposit for egregious behaviour. I recently forgot to lock a bike after use and lost 15 points from my account. You start off with a hundred points and get one per ride. If you go below 85 you pay much, much higher hourly rates than normal. All of these issues are soluble.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Just most of the people lack morals"

Society wouldn't exist if that were the case, most problems are caused by a minority.

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.

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.

Lived in France for some time, and bike sharing works fairly well. From time to time I've seen vandalized/bad condition/abandoned bikes, but never at the scale described in this article. You authorize something to the tune of 150€ charged from your credit card if bike is not returned on time, which eliminates extreme carelessness. So this is clearly a problem with implementation and said startups, not the sharing economy. There are people who behave like that everywhere.

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

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

I almost pissed myself laughing at this line.

Sadly I think the pun was completely missed by the author. :)

Shucks. Samsung beat them to it...

wasn't the battery supplier from China?

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