First-tier cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have capped the number of shared bikes since mid-September, when Beijing announced a moratorium on new deliveries of the bikes, after sheltering 2.35 million of them.
At the same time, local authorities have stepped up efforts to crack down on violations of bike-sharing practices: once bikes were allowed to block roads, they are now being thrown into the wilderness.
Born in a frenzy of sharing, they invaded the view and took over the streets of cities with irresistible force. And now, they also because of the irresistible force, were piled up in the site, with weeds, acts of rust.
1. Locked shared bikes
A few days ago, the car east and west reporter road through Beijing Haidian District shangdi Lenovo building, accidentally found the opposite used to be an open-air parking lot on a construction site, parked a lot of shared bikes. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is more to it than that. On the vacant lot, a huge phalanx of shared bikes stands in dense rows.
But they are not being inspected. The site is surrounded by walls and the gates are closed, locking up a large number of bikes in a deserted corner of the city. This time, it wasn’t the private locks that locked the bikes.
The bikes parked at the construction site include all the bike-sharing brands launched in Beijing, including Blue, Youyou, Kuqi and, of course, Mobike and Ofo. Setaria sprouting from under the wheels indicated that the bikes had been parked there for some time.
An employee at a bus dispatching station next to the site told Che that chengguan began pulling shared bikes there “one by one” a month ago, mostly because of traffic violations. Half a month ago, the haul ended — the lot was full. He did not know the exact number of bikes.
According to foot measurement combined with map APP, the site is about 50 meters by 100 meters rectangle, with a total area of about 5,000 square meters. If two bikes are placed per square meter, the number of shared bikes parked at the site reaches 10,000.
Closer observation, the car found that most of the car shape intact, body and two-dimensional code are not damaged signs, can still be for people to ride. The staff at the bus dispatching station said that during this period, no bike-sharing company came to pick up the bike. A new term has recently been adopted: “bike graveyard”. But for these bikes, the word “graveyard” is clearly inaccurate — it’s a description left to the dead. And the shared bikes in this site are still quite new and should be used.
But they were forgotten here, intentionally or not. Some of the bikes parked on the unhardened road surface have been overtaken by weeds.
And this is just one of many bike-sharing cemeteries in Beijing. Earlier, fengtai district under the “yellow car graveyard” has caused overheated discussions. And a month ago, tongzhou district under the earth bridge also appeared a scale of 10,000 bikes cemetery.
Amid a nationwide clampdown on shared bikes, more and more are being sent to similar construction sites. This is true in Beijing, as it is in other cities.
A large number of shared bikes are seen at a construction site in Nanjing’s Qinhuai district. Tens of thousands of bicycles pile up in an abandoned school in Anhui Province.
Hangzhou, which first drew attention to bike cemeteries, recently welcomed a second one, also a construction site.
But the largest of the bike-sharing graveyards is a construction site on Hongxing Road in Shanghai’s Jing ‘an district. This bike graveyard is a concentrated reflection of the struggle and helplessness of all parties around the excessive number of shared bikes.
From Shanghai Diwang to bike graveyard
In August last year, two blocks of land totaling 31,000 square meters — Linshan Road 143 and Linshan Road 13 — on Hongxing Road in Jing ‘an district of Shanghai were auctioned off by property developer Rongxin for 11 billion yuan. It became the “land king” with the highest total turnover at that time. Based on the gross floor area of 100,000, the floor price per square meter is more than 100,000 yuan. At that time, there was no lack of developers bidding vanke, Poly, China Resources.
At the site of Lane 13 on Linshan Road in the east, a “fleet” of shared bikes, larger than the one opposite Beijing’s Lenovo Tower, is surrounded by weeds 3, 40cm high — and that’s after it’s been cleaned up.
Before the vegetation was cleared at the site at the end of August, the shared bikes merged with nature in the arms of the earth King, reminiscent of a documentary, World After People.
A truck with a sign reading “Jing ‘an Si Street special Rectification of non-motor vehicles” stopped at the site, indicating why the shared bikes were there. On August 18, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Transport suspended the launch of new shared bikes, confiscating those outside the designated places.
But the car is never finished. Just down the street, lot 143 Linshan Road, once a car park, is now a shared bike park, or, more accurately, a shared bike stack.
The bikes here have fared far worse than their brand-lined counterparts on nearby streets. Starting from the corner of the wall in the northeast, shared bikes of various brands are mixed together to form a “bike wall” more than 2 meters high, stretching nearly 100 meters. From time to time, the click of a smart lock on a shared bike can be heard inside the wall.
Car things at the scene, when the municipal personnel to pull a car for illegal parking was seized bike. Workers did not take kindly to the public bikes, with one worker standing on top of a van lifting the bikes and throwing them over a 2-metre-high “bike wall”.
They don’t have time to line up the bikes gently. The driver told the car that they could pull more than 10 illegally parked bikes from Jing ‘an district every day, loading more than 30 bikes per trip on average.
More to the point, they don’t have space. In Shanghai, where land is at a premium, it is hard to find a space to park these massive bikes for free. Workers do not know how many bikes there are on the two sites, only that they “can’t put them down”.
An official at the site told Che Dong that the parking lot had been used as a parking place for illegal shared bikes since last year. In the beginning, the bikes were stacked up. But as more and more bikes were brought in, it became clear that the conventional two-dimensional pendulum had limited capacity, and as a last resort, the bikes went to the sky.
The workers feel helpless when they talk about the bikes that cause them trouble. Bicycles blocking roads and occupying roads are frequently reported by residents, so they need to go and collect them. There are dozens of missions ahead of them.
Soon, as the construction of the first phase of the “Diwang” project is approaching, the bicycles lined up in lane 13 will also be moved, and they will also face the fate of being put into the bike wall.
Three, the bike is in good condition but no one comes to collect
It may seem apocalyptic, but similar to those seen in Beijing, the bikes here are mostly functioning, albeit in a much warped form. The car randomly selected 4 bikes to scan the code, all successfully unlocked. The only snag was when one of the bikes got its wheels entangled with the other bikes, blocking the lock. Turn the wheel a little and its lock snaps open.
However, these perfect cars, just no one to collect.
While observing the neat bikes in lane 143, Chedong came across two Mobike staff who were checking the bikes on the spot. They checked locks and bodies in rows, then put a tag on the damaged vehicle. Their test results also confirmed chedong’s assessment of the integrity of the shared bikes in the area — more than 90 percent were found to be fine. A row of dozens of Mobikes was littered with only broken tags.
But their task is limited to counting. No bike-sharing company has taken further action, although Shanghai authorities have told the companies to take the bikes back.
The person in charge of 13 lane parking lot spoke of this tone excited, because before the car, there had been a lot of media to investigate reports, and even alerted the deputy mayor of Shanghai. But the problem remains unresolved.
One of the main reasons is cost. A city worker who carries the bikes gloomily thinks they will rot in situ. Because of the stacked bikes, “no one would pick them up for $5 each.” He may be right. In July, hangzhou city urban management revealed that the administrative cost of moving and managing 22,000 illegal shared bikes exceeded 220,000 yuan, with each bike costing nearly 10 yuan.
Mobike’s testers see it the other way: they don’t have enough people. With more than 1.5 million bikes on the city’s roads, the city would need 7,500 people to staff operations at 1/1,000 of the previous rate. With an average salary of 3,500 yuan, they will incur costs of 26 million yuan per month. Obviously, no bicycle company is willing to bear the high labor costs. In the case of Mobike, the inspector said that in Shanghai, each mobike operation and maintenance staff has to manage thousands of bikes, and they have no time to care about these abnormal vehicles.
Another explanation, given by industry insiders, is that even if the bikes are taken away, they will return to the sites — there are not enough dedicated parking Spaces for them in the city due to the oversupply of bikes, and the core value of shared bikes is still to park anywhere. Therefore, basically a stop is a business. Whether to pull them away at this time depends largely on whether city personnel are around.
Recently, at The Longze subway station in Beijing, where I commute daily, the urban management department set up a special area to build a special parking lot, where the blocked shared bikes are parked. The three-lane street is temporarily clear.
Within weeks, however, the bikes were back on the motorway — too small for the parking lot.
And the electronic fence which had been placed high hopes before, car things also found after the investigation, its implementation situation is not satisfactory. In a sense, a key factor in the triumph of shared bikes over public docked bikes is that they provide convenience for people to park anywhere. Bike-sharing companies clearly lack the internal drive to reach out to the core values of their rise.
Of course, bike-sharing companies are not entirely to blame. An interesting phenomenon is that in the early days of the development of shared bikes, when the limited number of bikes brought more convenience, the public opinion was more favorable to shared bikes. The author still remembers clearly the denunciation of the phenomenon of private lock and broken bicycle at that time. But now, more and more bikes are piled up at the gate of each community, and no one comes out to appeal for them. The lack of awareness of public right of way in Chinese people is also an important reason for shared bikes to spread to motorway again and again and block the entrance of community.
The deeper reason is that China’s road infrastructure planning, which focuses on motor vehicles in the process of urbanization, ignores the potential development demands of non-motor vehicles.
Driven by capital, public desire and policy balance, the three forces combine to lead to ups and downs of shared bikes. But now, the darling of capital is being dumped in the wasteland of sky-high prices, it is too dramatic.
“Out, sooner or later, I’ll pay you back.”
When we ride shared bikes to enjoy the convenience brought by them, we seldom realize that we are bearing the cost. This cost is not the fare of one dollar per hour, but the bike-sharing companies, with the support of capital, people and the government itself, forcibly borrow the public road resources and government management resources shared by the whole people, and provide them to the users of shared bikes at low prices or even free.
But neither of these resources is free, and since we don’t spend a lot of money on bike-sharing services, we have to pay something extra — either in time (congestion caused by the bikes) or money (administrative costs of managing the bikes are borne by taxpayers). When you hang out, you always have to pay it back.
Now people are waking up to these hidden costs. So will bike sharing be left out in the cold? Not really. Smart people always find the best balance of pros and cons after a period of exploration.
But the bikes, the symbols of human ingenuity and creativity, are still packed together and ticking away on construction sites.