Plenty of blame to go around
Finger-pointing begins as bike-sharing business hits roadblocks
Two months into the job, Huang says he’s seen it all.
By that, Huang, a smiling man in his late 40s who prefers to be called Lao Huang, doesn’t mean that he’s conquered all the details of his work. On the contrary, his job is extremely simple: putting misplaced shared bikes into designated docking stations in Beijing. Instead, Huang means he’s seen some of the worst manners and bad behavior of shared bike users.
“If you are on my job for one day, or even just a few hours, you will see all kinds of people and behavior. It’s not a pretty sight,” Huang told the Global Times on Saturday. “In these big cities, people don’t seem to care much about others.”
Huang’s attitude is just one side of the blame game taking place in many Chinese cities as people try to figure out what went wrong in the bike-sharing sector, which has been hailed as the future of urban commuting and a highlight of the country’s drive for innovation and the sharing economy.
Problems such as misplacement of bikes, safety and overcapacity at bicycle manufacturers have been exacerbated and caused serious headaches for governments, companies, users and residents after scores of technology start-ups rushed into the business – backed by vast amounts of funding – and flooded city streets with millions of colorful bikes.
There were more than 16 million shared bikes from nearly 70 providers across the country at the end of July, the Ministry of Transport (MOT) said in August. Just in Beijing, the number of bikes jumped from 700,000 in April to 2.35 million as of September, according to media reports.
The rapid rise of bike numbers has drawn strong criticism from some residents, who claim that their sidewalks, public areas, bus and subway stations have been buried under bicycles. Faced with regulatory tightening amid a growing tide of criticism about the problems their bicycles are causing, providers like Mobike and ofo have hired thousands of workers to organize their bikes.
Bad manners, bad attitudes
Huang is among thousands of people hired to manage the bikes. He moved to Beijing from his hometown of Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province in July to take the job after a friend sent him a posting from ofo. He has no complaints about working more than 12 hours a day for just 150 yuan ($23), but he’s fed up with bike users’ bad manners.
“I used to tell people to not leave the bikes on the streets, but they just completely ignored me. They pretended they didn’t even see me. So now I just go quietly to move the bikes after the riders lock them and leave,” said Huang, who was initially reluctant to be interviewed. “There is nothing you can do about it.”
“It’s definitely a man-made problem,” agreed a bike manager at Mobike surnamed Zheng.
“People just don’t follow rules. They all just want the easiest way for themselves,” he told the Global Times on Saturday after moving a locked bike parked on a main street, making his way through jammed traffic filled with cars angrily honking their horns and yelling in bustling Sanlitun, one of Beijing’s most crowded areas.
“I get it. It’s my job to do this and bikesharing is beneficial for many people, including myself. But we can take a few extra seconds to find a good place to park,” he argued.
Poor management, city planning
But for many frequent riders of shared bikes like Frances Lin, the problem is much bigger than just bad manners on the part of some users.
“I see so many bikes on the street but when I scan, almost one in every three has a problem. This is a management issue,” Lin told the Global Times on Saturday.
Moreover, for the majority of the users, it’s not that they are not willing to park the bikes in a designated place, it’s that there are not enough such spaces, especially in some busy areas such as Sanlitun, Lin said.
Many users also complain about safety issues riding a shared bike in cities like Beijing. “There is a bike lane, but nobody cares. We are talking about a city where people drive in all directions as they wish,” a Spanish tourist who only give his first name as Javier told the Global Times on Saturday.
Javier further noted that it was the idea
that he can park anywhere that impressed him. “We have something similar in Barcee lona, where I come from, but I didn’t know you can leave the bikes anywhere you want. I find that very useful,” he said.
As for the problems, Javier said this must be addressed by investment from the compaernment nies as well as governmen action
Government responsibility
The government in particular should take more responsibility, according to Yang Tao, chairman of the Nanjing Institute of City and Transport Planning Co, and Chen Shidong, an expert at the Institute of Comprehensive Transportation at the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top planpinion ning agency.
“Both public opnion and [government’] measures have been focused more on the ac countability of the companies and users. But the focus on government responsibility and implementation is insufficient,” they wrote in a note sent to the Global Times by Yang on Sunday.
Officials at both the central and local govlthough ernment levels, although repeatedly noting the benefits of shared bikes, have moved to tighten regulations for the industry.
The MOT along with nine other central government agencies on August 3 released an industry guideline, in which the governupport ment reaffirmed support for the industry but focused on regulation, including oversight of parking management and optimizing urban transport systems.
Several local governments have taken more aggressive measures to curb the sky rocketing number of shared bikes. As of Monday, eight cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have ordered companies not to put any more bikes on the street, according to media reports.
But Yang and Chen argue that, while some measures are necessary, the overall fogovernments cus should be on governments tackling longs standing problems such as illegal parking of automobiles and the weak infrastructure for urban bicycle users
Short investment horizon
But simply focusing on curbing the total number of bikes is not enough because the key is to have a system with clear oversight and registration requirements for compaen nies, Yang and Chen said.
They further argued that another contributor
to the problem is that a flood of startups entered the market without the need to meet any requirements as they were backed by short-term, speculative capital in search of quick returns.
China’s bike-sharing industry, despite having no track record of profitability, has attracted 6 billion yuan in investment from such heavyweights as Tencent, Xiaomi and Sequoia Capital, according to a report from iResearch.
Manufacturers go cold
The measures to curb the number of shared bicycles has sent a chill through manufacturing hubs such as Wangqingtuo, in North China’s Tianjin.
A few months ago, local manufacturers in Wangqingtuo were not shy about how they enjoyed opportunities the booming bikesharing industry had brought. Now, some just want to wash their hands of the whole thing.
“Shared bikes caused a lot of trouble here, and we don’t want to talk about it anymore,” a factory owner surnamed Yan told the Global Times on Friday. “A year ago, people were almost crazy about shared bikes, but some of them ended up losing a lot of money.”
Yan said he made the right decision in avoiding orders from ofo and Mobike, calling the industry’s investments in added capacity to meet such demand “blind and irrational.”
Such investments led to fierce competition, according to another owner of a bike frame factory surnamed Cao. About 50 percent of Cao’s monthly output of 150,000 units was for bike-sharing companies such as ofo and 99 Bicycle.
Cao, a 35-year-old local resident, said bike manufacturing is a traditional family business. “In this town, we [manufacturers] all know each other, we know who makes bike frames, who makes tires, this community is transparent,” he said.
But following the sudden rise of the bikesharing industry, “those who know little about this business suddenly came to compete with us, and we saw all kinds of problems like price competition,” Cao said.
More orders, more problems
The payment procedures of shared bike companies have also caused problems for factories in Wangqingtuo.
For example, ofo makes payment 90 days after taking delivery. But if there are cash flow problems at the bike-sharing companies, they may have difficulty making payment on time.
“Small producers that put too much money into capacity for shared-bike orders couldn’t get paid on time and ran into difficulty,” Cao said.
Meanwhile, a new round of environmental inspections have resulted in a wide range of factory shutdowns in North China’s Hebei Province and the suburbs of nearby Tianjin. The on-site inspections, which run until March 29, 2018, will root out problems with emissions and pollution control equipment, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
“The combination of cash flow problems and environmental inspections was too much for some small factories, which had to shut down,” Cao remarked.
Beyond the factories, the sector’s problems also put many jobs at risk.
In the first quarter of 2017, the shared bike sector helped create 70,000 new jobs nationwide, and bicycle manufacturers’ staff and workers who maintain and organize bikes in cities were the lowest-paid on the industry chain, said a report published by the State Information Center on September 9.
The average salary of employees in the bike maintenance sector is 3,835 yuan per month while factory workers get 4,442 yuan, the report showed.
Cities, industry need solutions
The radical expansion of shared bikes in the past two years generated problems for not only urban management but also traditional bicycle manufacturing, Zhu Dajian, director of sustainable development and the new type urbanization think tank of Tongji University, told the Global Times on Monday. “Traditional bike manufacturers should not fully depend on the bike-sharing business for an industry revival, as shared bikes must be distinguished from traditional ones,” he said.
Shared bikes, which are designed for public use, are part of the Internet of Things, and they have high turnover use rate, Zhu added. “They also use new technologies to produce smart locks, global positioning system devices, and so on, which is very different from producing traditional bicycles,” he noted.
However, bike-sharing companies, driven by capital and investors, have been shifting their focus from offering better products to pursuing market share by putting as many bikes as possible onto city streets. “This strategy has turned some low-quality shared bikes into garbage,” the director said.
At the earlier stage of the sector’s explosive expansion, one ofo bike cost just 300 yuan to make, Cao noted. “With such a low cost, it can order huge numbers of cycles at once and then deploy them into cities to conquer the market,” he said.
Today, more and more shared bikes can be seen broken, rusting and abandoned on streets, in fields and in huge heaps in remote urban areas. Local governments are left to deal with them and their fate has become a new dilemma.
“Halting deployment of new bikes will provide room to figure out how to manage and operate shared bikes, and who can do it better will win this battle in the near future,” Zhu said.