Alipay app unlocks 6 bike-sharing services

Proposed regulation for managing clutter put out for public comment

Bicycle riders in China are benefiting from a new deal in the country’s burgeoning bikesharing sector as six players team up with popular mobile payment tool Alipay.

The 450 million users of Alipay can now access the bikesharing services of the companies — ofo, Bluegogo, Youon, Hello bike, fun bike and U-bicycle — via its mobile app, to keep from having to download each company’s app and pay deposits in order to ride.

The service is available in 50 cities and connects Alipay with about 6 million bikes, over half of all the shared bikes in China, Ant Financial, owner of Alipay, said in a statement.

The move is a counterpunch to WeChat, the messaging-to-payment app that inked a sim- ilar deal with bike-sharing company Mobike in March. Alipay and WeChat are locked in fierce competition to win the offline payment market.

“This saves a lot of space on my smartphone and reduces the time to look for targeted bicycles, for I can choose six types of bikes now,” said Zhang Wentao, a Beijing bank worker. He deleted three other bikesharing apps on his phone.

Under the partnership Alipay will also provide insurance for each rider who accesses the service via its app.

Many college students and even professionals in China are returning to bicycles as a favorite transportation tool for short-distance travel, and a number of startups are scrambling to enable users to borrow and return bikes virtually anywhere at anytime.

Archrivals ofo and Mobike are backed respectively by Ant Financial and Tencent, which owns WeChat.

Zhang Xu, a transportation analyst at Beijing-based Analysys, said WeChat and Alipay hope the alliances will expand the offline use of their mobile payment services.

“For ofo and Mobike, the deals can accelerate their growth by tapping into tech heavyweights’ sizable user bases. But the impact is not decisive. The battle for supremacy still hinges on their bikes’ availability and quality,” Zhang said.

Customers who use the six companies’ own apps can still choose WeChat as the payment tool, Zhang said.

The mounting competition also comes as governments in Beijing and Shanghai are mulling plans to better regulate and facilitate the industry. The plans include capping the number of shared bikes, forbidding children under 12 from riding shared bikes and requiring the bikes to have GPS devices.

Zhou Zhengyu, head of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, said consumers like the services, which cultivate bicycle enthusiasts. But curbs are needed as some streets and sidewalks become overloaded with bikes.

Seeing the boom in the bike-sharing business, along with the resulting clutter created by randomly parked bikes, the Beijing municipal government has published a draft guideline for public comment, the top transport official said on Sunday.

Zhou Zhengyu, director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, said that while the city will control the growing number of shared bikes from different companies, it will not impose a numerical cap. Instead, it will let each district government decide its own limit, taking public needs into consideration, as well as the development needs of the companies.

“People in Beijing have accepted the shared bikes well,” he said. “This green transportation method has motivated more people to start to ride.”

Having seen the popularity of the bikes, the authority decided to suspend the expansion of governmentbacked public rental bikes.

“The shared bikes from private companies clearly have advantages compared with the public bikes, even though the frequency of public bike use hasn’t been affected much by the shared bikes,” Zhou said.

Beijing has 86,000 public rental bikes, stationed mainly near subway stations and residential communities, commission figures show. Because the public bikes have immovable racks on which bikes must be locked, many prefer the shared bikes, which can be picked up and parked at the rider’s convenience.

At present, Beijing has 700,000 shared bikes from companies including ofo, Mobike and Bluegogo. There are about 11 million registered users, equivalent to nearly half of Beijing’s population, the commission said.

The rapid growth started in August, and has created a few issues, like overcapacity and traffic disorder. Some users leave bikes randomly without obeying the regulations. And some companies put huge numbers of bikes on the street to protect their market share.

The Beijing guideline asks each district government to set a maximum number of shared bikes, then provide that to departments responsible for regulating the companies. It also requires companies to use technology to strengthen the management of illegal parking, in addition to ensuring the mechanical safety of the bikes by conducting regular tests.

Users who park illegally several times would be blacklisted, and companies would be barred from providing ser- vice to anyone on the list.

Lin Lei, 30, a regular user of the shared bikes, said he believes a better-regulated industry will raise the satisfaction level of users.

“In some places, shared bikes create a mess — piles of bikes — because people just throw them after use,” he said.

Yin Dafei, chief scientist in Mobike’s big-data department, said the company has technology that can predict the parking patterns of shared bikes, which will help it to organize them and raise the company’s operation efficiency.