I like what you’re pedalin’.
The vehicle one is Google Images ‘Lots Of Cars’.
And Washington, DC as well.
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谢谢
Xièxiè
Thanks for this ground-truth reporting. Very cool!
What you write is pretty much what I envisioned re: the advantages of bike-sharing. I had also wondered if maybe people got tired of poorly-maintained shared bikes, or if the docking (etc.) infrastructure was poorly conceived, or if it was simply market saturation, etc.
It probably doesn’t help that humans can and will create various versions of “tragedy of the commons” which in this case would be mixed with “hey it’s only a rental” thinking, and the usual hurly-burly of the busy, imperfectly paved streets of Shanghai. The humidity alone in that city (and the salt air from the sea) is not great for metal things with moving parts. Oh the agony of those poor bike mechanics; or maybe it’s job security for them.
Electric bikes could be appealing for those who aren’t physically up to a fully-human-powered pedaling, but I bet the learning curve could get ugly. I hear you. That braking system would have to be very conscientiously maintained for reliability. Eeeek! Not a great recipe for massive rapid profit in the Chinese socialist economy with marketplace characteristics.
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Oh there is. They, the company, share in your income.
In a kinder, nicer world it would be possible to imagine (for instance) a whole load of taxi companies in a town getting together to fund a joint website that would allocate based on proximity. It would still have to be paid for but you wouldn’t have vulture VC funds hoping to create a monopoly, put everyone else out of business and then jack up the prices. You’d find it because Google Maps would suggest it to you, so the whole thing should be relatively cheap. The only third party making a profit is the hosting company, which is legit.
Back in the early days of the Internet, I wanted to go on holiday in the South of France. I found a town bulletin board for the area I wanted, which included details of rentals. I emailed somebody, fixed up an agreement, and we turned up. A little more difficult than AirBnB but I knew the Mairie would have vetted anybody advertising. It worked very well. AirBnB isn’t needed, it exists because of very lazy people (and all the people who would have been told “no” by the nice lady at the Mairie who, it turned out, knew everything.)
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China is investing in parts of Africa. Sell them over there. At lest recoup some cost.
In Denver they get used, the problem is most everyone is commuting the same direction, with a lot of bikes piling up at one location. So the program spends a lot of time picking up a bunch of bikes and hauling them back to the other areas, killing a lot of the cost, and efficiency savings.
I think people in Denver just like bikes, so that’s why they stay.
Edit: Here in Aurora they started a similar program, except the city isn’t paying for it, just setting the rates. Aurora’s is so drastically different then dense, expensive Denver; I’m not sure how they’ll get used. My guess is they’ll have minor usage, or teenagers will use them in a way that makes grumpy people angry, and they’ll be banned.
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Most of those bikes are made from pot metal mixed with lead so they are essentially worthless once they hit the street. You can’t resell them to recoup losses, and to ship them to other countries would expose them to salt rot. I would just bury them all and forget it ever happened.
Thing is these bike share schemes are not about renting the bikes and its business sustainability. Its about collecting the deposit to put into investment schemes. If the company is going out of business its because they made poor investment bets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-04/the-china-bike-rental-money-cycle
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Similar to the St. Paul experience (in the article), Gainesville, FL was experiencing a serious bike theft problem when they unveiled the Yellow Bike program. Between bike thieves and homeless commandeering yellow bikes, the entire fleet was almost nonexistent in the matter of a few weeks.
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Oh, there’s sharing alright, just not say, between individuals with cars and individuals needing rides (as you mention.)
The sharing is between the individual with a car and the corporation, in that the individual is “sharing” their capital goods with the corporation. This neat little trick permits Uber to spend nothing on capital goods compared to just about any multi-billion dollar business not in the “sharing” sector of the economy.
The downside of owning no capital goods is that a business is only as valuable as the cash it has on hand, making a sucker of anyone who thinks Uber stock is a long-term bet.
(My bet is Uber goes down in flames during the next recession.)
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I think that’s the point that sebwiers was making. This was a massively distorted market (like many are), so the result was totally expected; and does not reflect what a true market would create.
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Early Stage Capitalism
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I think in this application sharing simply refers to more than one person using a physical item as opposed to single ownership. more like time share, or stock share, than sharing half a cookie with a friend.
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Or maybe it’s a brazen attempt to use emotionally manipulative language to create an unearned positive public image.
yeah…hard to know if it is a global conspiracy of collusion to manipulate us through language, or simply people using the second most common definition of the word in english? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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ockham? 
Now you got me looking up the origin to confirm…the origin of this specific usage in modern times has a positive meaning, nothing conspiratorial, nor manipulative intent.
alternate terms such as “renting pools” just don’t have the same ring.
They should park them in their empty, speculative cities.
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