Why the days of a neat idea, bicycle sharing, may be numbered
Ialmost came to grief the other day in a small park not far from where I live when a boy trying to ride one of those yellow rental bikes you see all around Beijing lost balance and crashed to the ground just in front of me.
“Come on, son, try again,” a middle-aged man told the boy, who was, I suppose, about 10.
“The handle’s twisted,” the boy replied.
“No worries. Let’s find another one,” the man replied, leaving the bike lying in a flower bed and walking off with the boy.
Within a few minutes there the boy was again, astride another shiny new yellow bike, practicing his riding skills.
“There are just no standards any more,” my friend said. “Essentially his father just told him that it’s OK to go around wrecking things.”
All I could do was sigh in agreement.
Over the past couple of years many big Chinese cities have lived through what can only be described as some dire days when it comes to air pollution. However, against that, some very positive things have happened on the environmental front. One of them is the proliferation of bicycle-sharing services, something that can contribute, even if in only a small way, to taking cars off our roads.
Beyond environmental considerations, it is the ease of access to the service that attracts commuters. To use the orange bicycles of the company Mobike you download an app and pay a deposit of 300 yuan ($45). It costs 0.5 yuan for half an hour. There are no fixed pick-up or drop-off points for the bikes, which can be located with the help of GPS signals and then unlocked by scanning a QR code.
Convenience
By the end of last year there were 18.86 million bike-sharing app users in China, says BigData research. Bike sharing service has delivered them convenience and given all of us a little environmental respite but, as with many innovations, there have been nefarious side effects as well.
Reports of all kinds of bad behavior abound, of which the following is but a small catalogue:
Case 1:
Theft. Some thieves have