Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We experience the same vandalism problems in our little French town of 50k inhabitants.
The bikes are thrown in rivers, stolen and found in Africa, burned, thrown from the 14th floor etc etc
We hired 4 people whose sole job is to fetch and repair those bikes.
Tax payer money well spent?
That was unexpected. How do they end up in Africa? Sounds like there is an interesting story there. I can see teenagers stealing them, throwing them from a roof, vandalizing them, but how in the world do they have the dedication to ship them to a different continent. I guess it could be "a challenge" to impress their peers.
People send stuff back to Africa all the time. I can't say anything about the bike (obviously), but I can tell you what an African friend of mine does for a living; in the middle of Europe.
He sends stuff back to Africa. What he does is he rents out a container on a ship and then collects the payload in small units. I advertises in the African community (mainly Togo) and sells small amount of space on that container. People want to send stuff to their relatives on the continent all the time.
I hope my mildly related anecdote was helpful.
They see them as cluttering the streets and operating without the proper licencing and permissions.
To rectify the issue, they will happily throw 50 bikes into the river each time they pass a parking area.
They see it as doing the government/the people a favour. The guy I spoke to who did this didn't have a smartphone, so I would guess hadn't even used the scheme.
Edit: it'd be nice if the downvoters explained why did they downvote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Also, I didn't comment about voting. I replied to a comment and then added a line about the downvotes later (after I got downvoted without any explanation) because I don't feel good in this kind of environment.
Edit: apparently now I'm "posting too fast" (2 comments per hour is fast? OK...), so there's my reply to the child comment that says it seems trollish: "Yeah I agree - if there wasn't the explanatory sentence after that. You can't just downvote the whole comment based on its first sentence, it has a completely different meaning without the rest."
Edit: as a consequence, people tend to downvote instead of engage with your comment, because they don't want to feed the trolls.
The common approach these companies take is to try to establish their brand as the leading one in a large city, so that in time they can turn a profit due to their scale and dominance. To get there, they need to beat the competition first. Because this is a new type of enterprise and a novel use of public space, they simply start operating, and hope to persuade the local government of their merits in the course of operating their business.
In a city like Amsterdam, where a bunch of these companies popped up overnight, this caused a sudden increase in the number of bicycles parked on the city streets (most people in Amsterdam already own their own beat-up city-bicycle which tends to be parked in front of their houses) that took on such a worrying scale that the municipal government banned them for now. These companies lost their bet in Amsterdam until regulation is in place, but they will continue to push their business model everywhere.
What makes otherwise reasonable people irate is the way these companies are laying claim to our public streets without taking responsibility for the consequences. Their business model depends on smartphone apps that show users the nearest available bicycle, instead of having dedicated parking spaces for them. So as a consequence of this model, users leave their rented bicycles wherever they dismount, because it stops being their problem at that point, and the pickup trucks that gather these bicycles from inconvenient locations for repair and redistribution tend to leave them in places with a lot of pedestrian traffic, blocking the pedestrian paths in the process.
People tend to not like it when local inhabitants can't pass through a street with a pram or a wheelchair without stepping onto the car lanes because someone dumped a bunch of brightly coloured rent-a-bikes on the footpath.
Increasingly, as Chinese companies try to expand abroad (valuations are so inflated in China that diversifying geographically is very tempting, much like 80s Japan), they are going to stumble a bit due to less familiarity with other societies, e.g. [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/business/economy/ohio-fac...
https://qz.com/919739/chinese-bike-sharing-startups-like-ofo...
Bike sharing in china: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYu4wzy9Lw
Interesting to see that this approach of vandalism is working. It's a shame people aren't physically strong enough to throw cars into rivers and from rooftops. Perhaps then Paris could be rid of its car problem.
Long story short, I’m glad to see them go, even though I would have preferred them to be banned rather than vandalized.
I'm from a city with lots of space so their rental bikes are never in the way. They're always in a proper place.
Also they have a system that you must return the bike to one of the rental stations within the allotted time. If you don't do that you will get a fine since you must use your personal info to rent them.
Well, actually, the nuissance of the people not knowing how/where to put the bike away properly and/or being too lazy to do so or just being too selfish and not caring about others at all. Just like there's always this couple of car drivers parking where they shouldn't etc. But with these bikes it's just way easier to do. Just like it's also way easier for you or any one else to pick up the bike and put it away 2m further if that's less annoying, which is what I'd do if it would be in my way.
In the end I think the only solution is a mentality shift and more bikes, contradictory as that may sound. When enough people realize their behaviour is super annoying they might actually do something about it. In cities with a thousand times more bikes than in Paris there aren't too much problems like this because most are in the same boat.
there is such little room in the Parisian streets
Hmm, I'm not sure what part of the city exactly you're talking about and yes there aren't too many official bike parkings but in general I'd say there's plenty of room to tuck away a couple of bikes. Perhaps not always right in front of the place one wants to be, but still..
Which is exactly the point: I don't use those bikes, and still I have to get them out of my way. That's the nuisance.
That's exactly why parking in such places is illegal in the first place. But with those rental bikes this is very hard to enforce (because it's virtually impossible for the police to tell who parked the bike). And I think Gobee should have been banned in Paris because their whole business model encourages such a behavior in cities where there is so little parking places.
> Perhaps not always right in front of the place one wants to be, but still..
I agree, but that's precisely the issue. The problem here is that the model encourages users to just not care about the bike (because they're anonymous and because they don't care about the bike). Sure, in the end, if users were perfect Gobee would be great. But you know this is never the case as soon as there is some level of anonymity (why do would most websites have captchas then?).
In theory, it should be easy: Gobee has that info. Has the police asked?
How so? Gobee can just check where it was the moment the renter locked it.
the renter is quite likely to be a foreign tourist (fining them is near impossible without the benefit of a license plate like you have with a car).
Gobee uses digital payment systems, which are not anonymous.
(I've talked to the people who move the bikes about this as well, since they have a hell of a time finding them sometimes)
Dockless bikes quickly became a nuisance, a few days after gobee.bike released their fleet. People left those bikes everywhere, including on pedestrian space and bicycle lanes.
On a personal note : there is a well maintained and dock-based bike sharing system provided by the town council in Lille. If bike sharing, as some point, become a part of the town's infrastructure — see: Paris with Velib, Lyon and Lille — I do not see the need nor the space for concurrent offerings from different bike networks.
Velov works really well but there is a trade off. The local government gives away the rights to all the external advertising in the city to the company behind the Velov bikes. The company provides the bikes and, in turn, gets to on sell the advertising space on bus shelters, outdoor signs, pretty much everywhere in the city it seems. A little bit of competition would not be a bad thing, I think, though it would be hard for any competitor to overcome the advantages that a big advertising company like JCD has in terms of their revenues from the signage.
In Melbourne where we have oBike no-one talks about anything else.
The DB bikes were pretty sturdy though - I typically referred to 'renting a tank'.
There were some rumours the Chinese bike rentals were only after their customer's data, since none of their models could've been profitable. Maybe they gathered enough and are on their way out?
A lot of people forget to refund their own deposit, and the rental company gets to keep a lot of money.
I'm French and living in Germany, I laughed while reading this. The countries are close to each others but the culture is different, especially concerning vandalism/individualism. I have many examples like the cleanliness of public spaces to the state of public bikes (comparing Velib' v. StadtRAD, the German version works way better), the general feeling being that French people undervalue the impact of one's acts on a global community, leading to the situation described in the article.
Ask a German why do they pay more for health instances than in France and they will answer "Our debt is going down, our kids will not pay more than us and the system should work in the long term.", I had never heard that thought before moving outside of France.
In Munich, Deutsche Bahn has successfully operated a dockless bike sharing scheme for more than a decade. Last year, oBike dumped thousands of bikes in the streets, and these have been subject of quite a bit of vandalism. The reason is probably that the introduction was poorly managed. They literally dumped a huge number of bikes in the streets overnight, which was a bit of a nuisance and probably kind of invited vandalism.
Apparently some people see the rental bikes from this company, O-bike, as an unwanted Chinese intrusion into their country.
Docked systems seem to work really well (e.g. London), presumably because you can’t take a bike without leaving your credit card details.
The main difference is.. who's looking after the vehicle.
With Uber, the vehicle is typically owned by the driver, so the driver has interest in making sure the customers (riders) don't vandalize it. Not only that, it's in the driver's best interest to keep the vehicle maintained.
With these bike sharing companies, nobody except the company owns the bike. And since nobody is watching over the customers, they don't feel the need to behave.
You can say, "Just force them to put deposit, and if the bike is damaged, deduct their deposit." Well, how do you know if the bike is damaged by them, and not random bypassers?
You don't but the point of the deposit is simply to act as a deterrent. When your deposit is on the line, you have an incentive to look after the bike while it is in your possession. You wouldn't purposely seek to damage it if it is going to cost you. It takes the "fun" out of vandalising and that is usually sufficient.
Sometimes when catching the train I cannot take a bicycle. In theory I could hire a bike at the far end and just leave my bike at the start station. However, this I never think to do. I might think of getting a bus or even a taxi but I would never think to get a hire bike. Even though there is a rack of them outside the station.
Out of my non-cycling friends, the people that drive to work or just walk, these people have not taken their bicycles out of the shed for many, many years. They are no likely to re-orient their entire commuting experience around some hire bikes as they decided a long time ago that being on the streets with no crumple zones was not for them.
I do know people that do get about on Boris bikes once in a while, as a fun way to get around London with friends on a weekend, but not as part of a serious commute.
There are better ways to get bikes on the road, the bike to work tax free scheme being one of them. This has got a lot of people cycling in the UK. It is also about time that normal bicycles are a bit more legally sensible. With cars we no longer allow 1970's standards (e,g, no seat belts). I am not saying we add airbags to bicycles but we could update the law so bicycles have to have lights the minute they get put in the showroom, mandatory and part of the bike. LED lighting makes that doable.
Similarly, tyres could be made to be 'road legal' with some puncture protection made mandatory. There could also be a small tax benefit for bicycles designed for utility purpose, taxed differently to the sport bikes that have no mudguards.
With a lower tax on 'utility' bikes a subtle shaping of bikes sold could result in safer roads with more people riding year round, mostly for commuting reasons. People would be able to pay the extra for their carbon fibre road bikes that don't have the lights, mudguards and sensible lock, that would be standard VAT, not the bargain 'utility' rate.
A defined 'utility' bike that is personally owned could be insured very differently to a 'sports' bicycle, perhaps more affordably, with reasonable third party cover. Meanwhile 'fixies' such as that one that was involved in a tragic accident killing a pedestrian, those bikes would not be as cheap to ride or likely to be so prevalent on the roads.
The other advantages are not having to worry about theft, being able to get a bike wherever you are even if you didn't anticipate it, and being able to get somewhere by bike and go back in a car with someone else or vice versa.
Well, some of us do think to do so. Until recently I had a commute that required me to take a bus that stopped 2km from my house; using the shared bikes was perfect for that connection, whereas using my bike would have required leaving it all day on the street, and taking a bus/tram was slower than walking.
I don't know about London, but the Brussels system had 1.5M rides in 2016 and more than 40 000 long-term subscribers.