Share cycles Apps are heading in China

New cycle-share firms in China allow you to simply drop your bike wherever you want. They have caused colorful chaos – and world cities could be next.

Thousands of confiscated share bikes. Mobike alone has flooded China’s cities with more than a million of its orange and silver bikes in less than a year. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images

On a 30ft-wide screen in Hangzhou’s public bike share office, the counter ticks up relentlessly: 278,812 … 278,847 … 278,883 … Another 40 cycle rentals every couple of seconds. The system will easily top 350,000 before this bitterly cold winter day is out.

On the left of the giant screen, the world’s 15 biggest public bike shares are ranked. Thirteen of them are in China. (Paris is No 5 with 21,000 bikes, and London No 12, with 16,500). Hangzhou – an hour west of Shanghai by bullet train – is slightly larger than London by population, but its share system is five times the size. It comfortably tops the table with 84,100 cycles, almost twice as many as its nearest rival.

 

In many other large Chinese cities, though, it’s not the sturdy, official public hire bikes that stand out. It’s the rash of brightly colored “dockless” share bikes, haphazardly parked on the pavements in their thousands.

Dubbed “Uber for bikes”, they are the product of a whole host of new startups, aggressively competing for territory and investment.

The way it works is simple enough in theory. Users download an app that tells them where to find a cycle, which they unlock by scanning a QR code on their phones or using a combination they are sent. Unlike traditional rental services, however, which require bikes to be returned to a fixed docking station, riders are free to leave the bikes wherever their journey ends.

The scale is simply stunning. In less than a year, Mobike alone has flooded the streets of 18 Chinese cities with what is thought to be more than a million new bikes. Since last April, the company has placed more than 100,000 of their trademark orange-and-silver bikes in each of the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

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In just the three months of 2017, Mobike – co-founded by Hu Weiwei and Davis Wang, former head of Uber Shanghai – has launched in six more cities; Changsha, Hefei, and Tianjin were added this past month. Already backed by the Chinese internet giant Tencent, a recent deal with Apple supplier Foxconn has doubled Mobike’s production capacity to 10m bikes a year.

Then there’s Ofo – which started in 2015 as a Peking University project and now claims 10 million users in 33 cities for its bright yellow bikes – and Bluegogo, Xiaoming and around a dozen more copycat firms, many of which have started up in the past six months.

Seven hundred miles to the southwest, on the streets of the fast-growing Pearl River manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, the colorful dockless share bikes are everywhere. They are parked up by the hundred outside shopping malls and metro stations, often blocking the pavement; others, rendered useless by missing saddles, broken the lock or scratched off QR code, are simply dumped in flowerbeds and bushes.

But after decades of decline – when a whole generation of Chinese, embracing economic freedom, worshiped the private car and saw cycling as backward – these sharing apps have clearly made cycling cool again in China. Most users appear to be in their 20s and 30s, many riding one-handed, smartphones glued to their ears. This popularity is new: the share of trips taken by bike in Guangzhou had dropped from above 20% in the late 1990s to around 5% a few years ago; Beijing’s cycle modal share had collapsed from a high of above 60% in the mid-1980s. No official estimates yet take account of the impact of these new share bikes, but there’s no escaping them on the streets of China’s big cities.

What’s more, they’re about to be exported worldwide. Mobike is launching in Singapore this year, while rival Bluegogo controversially started operations in San Francisco without official permission, Uber-style. (The city planning department issued warnings and could prosecute.) Ofo has a container of 500 bikes on its way to Cambridge, and there are rumours Mobike is targeting London, Birmingham, and Manchester.