The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles

[dalton99a]

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/

The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles
Alan Taylor | Mar 22, 2018 | 30 Photos

Last year, bike sharing took off in China, with dozens of bike-share companies quickly flooding city streets with millions of brightly colored rental bicycles. However, the rapid growth vastly outpaced immediate demand and overwhelmed Chinese cities, where infrastructure and regulations were not prepared to handle a sudden flood of millions of shared bicycles. Riders would park bikes anywhere, or just abandon them, resulting in bicycles piling up and blocking already-crowded streets and pathways. As cities impounded derelict bikes by the thousands, they moved quickly to cap growth and regulate the industry. Vast piles of impounded, abandoned, and broken bicycles have become a familiar sight in many big cities. As some of the companies who jumped in too big and too early have begun to fold, their huge surplus of bicycles can be found collecting dust in vast vacant lots. Bike sharing remains very popular in China, and will likely continue to grow, just probably at a more sustainable rate. Meanwhile, we are left with these images of speculation gone wild—the piles of debris left behind after the bubble bursts.


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


Because of overcapacity at launch, over 10,000 bike-share service bicycles were abandoned at a bicycle graveyard on January 13, 2018, in Xiamen, Fujian, China


This is not a field of tulips, but a drone's-eye-view of tens of thousands of unused share bikes lined up in a field near Shanghai


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

More photos at link

[Canoe52]

1. Crazy!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. I keep wondering

what exactly was the business model? How did people pay to use the bikes?

And that they didn't seem to return them to a proper return place -- unless there never were return places to begin with -- makes me wonder a great deal about the honesty and ethics of the Chinese.