Bikeageddon

London has recently been flooded with new bike-share schemes, notably Mobike, and the new yellow Ofo bikes - a company founded in Beijing.

Already I've seen a few dumped and abandoned around the place. A warning sign? In China, they massively over-estimated the demand. The results are not reassuring:

[Reuters]
A worker rides a shared bicycle past a huge pile of unused shared bikes in a vacant lot in Xiamen, Fujian province, China, on December 13, 2017.

[Elizaveta Kirina / Shutterstock]
Shared bikes stored and piled in Shanghai on February 1, 2018.

[Reuters]
A man walks past piles of share bikes outside a repair shop in Beijing on April 13, 2017.

[AFP / Getty] 
An aerial view of shared bicycles, collected by police after they blocked streets and sidewalks, abandoned in a field in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on June 28, 2017.

[TPG / Getty]
Ofo bike-share service bicycles sit lined up in a street on November 23, 2017, in Beijing, China.

[Zhangjin_net / Shutterstock] 
Shared bicycles block a pathway in Jiuxianqiao, Chaoyang district, Beijing, on July 14, 2017.

[Aly Song / Reuters]
Bicycles from various bike-sharing services sit in a lot in Shanghai, China, on November 27, 2017.

[Kevin Frayer / Getty]
A worker from the bike-share company Ofo puts a damaged bike on a pile beside a makeshift repair depot for the company. Thousands of derelict bikes are being kept in the depot after coming off the road on March 29, 2017, in Beijing.

[AFP / Getty] 
Bicycles from bike-sharing firms lie dumped near the entrance of Xiashan park in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on January 16, 2017.

[Aly Song / Reuters]
Bicycles of various bike-sharing services completely fill a large lot in Shanghai, China, on November 23, 2017.

Comments

[gavin]

once again saving the world from capitalist global warming.

[Spellchecker to the Stars]

One g, two ds

[Mick H]

Ah yes. Thanks.

[Martin Adamson]

I'm guessing that because bikes in China are very heavily associated with the poverty and repression of the Mao era, there is now - except for a tiny clique of the Westernised elite - a huge social stigma to riding them. Even if - or precisely because - they are still a very cheap and practical way of getting around.

Or perhaps - and here we are getting into a territory currently viewed as racist - there are just some deeply engrained underlying cultural attitudes towards shared, communal property that make such a scheme impossible in some countries, because not enough people have the sense of social responsibility required to put the bikes back in the rack once the journey is done.

[gavin]

name a culture where shared, communal property really works.
hippy settlements do not count.

[LAG]

Once again proof that no one washes a rental car.