Bike Share Oversupply in China

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.

I feel similarly, as do others. I mean, "Wow. Look at These Astounding Photos of Abandoned Dockless Vehicles in America." https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-capture...

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It probably costs more to ship them than they're worth.

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.

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.

You can buy shipping containers of these from Japan and China.

If you want 10 inside the US, just pick them up off the playa after Burning Man ;D

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.

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?

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.

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.

The same goes for mining cryptocurrency.

What makes you think these bicycles will be scrapped? I imagine most of them will be sold at auction.

Bikes in Africa are often used for cargo carrying. I doubt the type of bike used for sharing would help.

It looks like there is a charity for this, if it interests you to donate: https://worldbicyclerelief.org/en/

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.

Reminds me of the successful campaign by Toms: https://www.toms.com/improving-lives

I bet these companies could do something similar once established.

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.

Many of them are mobikes and ofos, which are certainly not out of business. Which photograph do you think is incorrectly captioned?

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.

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.