Jump in rental bikes is proving to be more of a nuisance than a boon
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EDITOR’S note:
Andy Boreham comes from New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington, and has lived in China, off and on, for the past four years. Now he is living in Shanghai earning a master’s degree in Chinese culture and language at Fudan University. He welcomes your feedback on all of the issues he covers — you can reach him at andy.boreham@shanghaidaily.com.
WHEN the bike-sharing craze hit Shanghai about a year ago, I thought it was a great idea. I’m not so sure now.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s absolutely important to get more people out of cars, off congested public transport and into using pedal power again.
It’s good for planet Earth and it’s good for our health. But this explosion of competition between multiple bike-sharing companies has hit a snag.
Not for the bike-sharing companies, of course.
Ofo (the yellow bike company), as one example, is now valued at a staggering US$500 million. More and more companies are lining up to compete in this new market.
The problem has come in the form of clogged streets, littered with lines and lines and lines of haphazardly placed rental bikes — some operational, some not — in every color of the rainbow. It’s not pretty, and it’s not functional.
Most of these bikes move like a tidal wave on a daily basis, where they go from drenching suburban streets in the evening after work, to literally flooding Metro stations in the morning where they are left for the entire day.
Anyone who uses the Metro knows that now it is sometimes impossible to find a gap through which to enter the station among all the rental bikes.
And if you hoped to ride your own bike to the subway station, you can just forget it! It is literally unfeasible to expect to find a space like it was even just a few months ago.
Then there are the bikes which have been abandoned. They’re broken, unusable, and perhaps a sign that these things weren’t designed for the long haul.
Although most apps provide a way to notify the company if your bike is broken — using a GPS location so that the bikes can be picked up and repaired — in actuality it happens at a snail’s pace.
There are a bunch of broken bikes which have been sitting outside my place for more than a week.
It’s a sign that the service is popular, which is great for a number of reasons already mentioned, but more needs to be done to keep this sea of bikes in check, so that the streets and Metro stations of Shanghai can remain functional.
There are 280,000 rental bikes on the streets of Shanghai already, and that’s set to hit 500,000 by the middle of the year, making Shanghai the most popular city for rental bikes on the entire planet.
That’s a problem, if more isn’t done to iron out the kinks in this bicycle revolution which will see China taking the crown again as the country of bikes.
Chengguan (city management officials) currently don’t have a mandate to manage these bikes, so the burden has fallen on local parking workers, and the police in some instances.
Just last week police in Shanghai’s Huangpu District were forced to confiscate thousands of the beasts from seven different companies because of the way they were parked on the streets and around Metro stations.
Funnily enough, the bike companies have been slow to come and collect them from a huge parking lot — they probably don’t have enough staff!
Following the mass seizure of bikes, at least one company has agreed to install a new app feature which suggests adequate parking spots.
But proposed new legislation in Shanghai will hopefully help out even more. Some draft guidance has been released which, while not yet law, can be enacted by bike companies at their will.
Provisions include a three-year life limit on bikes before they need to be scrapped and replaced (they currently seem to last much less than that!), age and height limits for safety reasons (under 12 years old and over 70 and you’ll be restricted, as will those taller than 195cm), and a 48-hour time limit for companies to fix or remove bikes which have been marked as inoperable by users and left on the streets.
Even though there have been massive teething problems, I really do hope that bike sharing will continue to grow in China, albeit in a more controlled and manageable manner. I’ve even considered ditching my own bike and just using these apps, although I haven’t taken the plunge just yet.
I guess I’ll wait and see how these new provisions work out. I’m crossing my fingers.
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