Bike-Sharing Oversupply in China Resulting in Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles

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Trashed ride share bikes piled high Image via Reuters

– News of interest to Quincy covered by Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.

 

Bike sharing oversupply in China is resulting in huge piles of abandoned and broken bicycles in many Chinese cities.

 

Last year, bike sharing took off in China, with dozens of bike-share companies quickly flooding city streets with millions of brightly-colored rental bicycles. 

 

Hefei, Anhui, China bike pile
A TFP/Getty Images image

The rapid growth, however, vastly outpaced immediate demand and overwhelmed Chinese cities where infrastructure and regulations were not prepared to handle a sudden flood of millions of shared bicycles.

 

All too often riders park bikes most anywhere or just abandon them, resulting in bicycles piling up and so blocking already-crowded streets and pathways. 

 

 

Further, sprawling piles of impounded, abandoned, and broken bicycles have become a familiar sight in many big cities in China as some of the companies who jumped in both too big and too early have begun to fold.

 

Abandoned bikes piled high in Xiamen Fujian province, China, December 13, 2017
Third Party image via Reuters

And yes, bike sharing is coming to Quincy even the bloom appears to be off the boom – the Hong Kong-based company ofo is planning to role out its bikes in Quincy in coming weeks.

 

oro bikes piled high
A third party image via Reuters

While the relatively long ongoing Hubway bike sharing service has proven to be successful in more densely populated Boston, Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville, is bike sharing right for the Q?

 

Additionally, whereas Hubway relies on a widely dispersed and multiple site pick and return location model, oro operates a “dockless” approach. 

 

Bike rental station in Beijing, China
Image via TPG/Getty Images

Per the dockless approach, one rents a bike and once done with riding it, a rider just locks it up wherever the ride ends until another rider might come along.  While this approach may work in a densely-populated Chinese city, will it work in much less dense Quincy?

 

Also, Quincy’s bike-share franchisee has already found itself in trouble over a lobbying dispute in Florida and was so expelled from The North American Bikeshare Association for violating the association’s code of conduct. 

 

Campaign Finance
A wemu.org image

So far, however, Quincy Quarry has all but incredibly not seen any obvious signs in Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance data of any pay for play local political campaign fund contributions by this bike share operator. 

 

Granted, bike sharing remains very popular in China and it will likely continue to grow both there as well as elsewhere, albeit most probably at a more realistically sustainable rate going forward.

 

In the meanwhile, however, many cities in China are rife with huge piles of debris left behind after the ride-share bubble burst

 Source: The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles

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