Herald Sun reported recently:
FOR A CITY that has embraced deconstructed avocado smash, food trucks for dogs and every other wanky inner-city trend, Melbourne sure is narrow-minded when it comes to oBikes.
The controversial bicycle-sharing service hoped to encourage more people within Melbourne and Sydney to choose riding over public transport or driving.
Costing just $1.99 for half an hour — plus a $69 membership fee that is refundable on request — the yellow, GPS-tracked rental bikes sounded like a dream for inner-city hipsters wanting something to boast about while tucking into cheese and smashed avocado at the MCG.
Only oBike wasn’t able to gain traction with Melburnians — something evident from the long list of social media posts slamming the company for creating “visual pollution” across the city.
As the service requires no physical docking stations, the bicycles can be left anywhere not posing a risk to public safety.
Sadly, this meant people started to leave the rental bikes at the bottom of lakes, on bus stops and pretty much everywhere else you would leave them if you were a delinquent.
While Sydney was later to the party when it came to getting oBikes, it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see similar venting from residents in the coming months.
Let me save everyone the trouble. Exactly the same thing will happen in every Australian city that these things are rolled out (except perhaps Canberra). The revolt is also global, via The Guardian:
If there is one sad fact that technology has taught us, it’s maybe that we just can’t have nice things. Now Washington DC has become the latest testing ground for what happens when technology and good intentions meet the real world.
Brightly coloured bikes began popping up around the US capital in September like little adverts for a better world. On a recent trip two lemon yellow bikes were propped up in the autumn sun by the carousel on the Mall. A pair of lime green bikes added a splash of colour to a grey corner of DuPont Circle. An orange and silver bike waited excitedly for its rider outside the George Washington University Hospital.
Behind this bucolic scene is a multibillion-dollar cutthroat battle that is pitching two of China’s most successful tech companies against Silicon Valley-backed rivals and a system that has proved, shall we say, problematic, in other cities.
DC’s dockless bike experiment is a beta test designed to run through April next year. It seems to be working beautifully. The city already has close to 4,000 docked bikes serving two million-plus riders a year with its Capital Bikeshare system. So far the companies offering dockless bikes – China’s Mobike and Ofo and the US-backed LimeBike, Spin and Jump – have only been allowed to put up to 400 bikes each on the streets. That’s six bike companies for a city of just over 680,000 people – not all of them bike riders.
Sadly in other cities this green – and taxpayer-free – solution to urban transport issues has turned into a surreal nightmare.
In China, where there are some 16 million shared bikes on the street and MoBike alone now has over a million, the authorities have been forced to clear up ziggurats of discarded bikes. Residents of Hangzhou became so irritated by bikes lazily dumped by riders, and reportedly sabotaged by angry cab drivers, that the authorities were forced to round up 23,000 bikes and dump them in 16 corrals around the city.
“There’s no sense of decency any more,” one Beijing resident recently told the New York Times after finding a bike ditched in a bush outside his home. “We treat each other like enemies.”
In the UK bikes have been hacked, vandalized and thrown on railway tracks. In Australia dumped bikes have been mangled into pavement blocking sculptures – perhaps in a homage to technology’s promise of “creative destruction”.
Utteeyo Dasgupta, assistant economics professor at Wagner College in New York, said the bike dilemma had some similarities to the “tragedy of the commons” – the economic theory that individuals using a shared resource often act according to their own interests and to the detriment of the shared resource.
I put it down to local culture. Melbourne’s oBike roll-out is by a Singaporean firm. No doubt it works just fine at home, given it’s cut your hair first and ask questions later.
But anywhere you find a goodly population of ratbags, along with a wider population that has a quiet regard for same, a carpet-bombing of rental bikes will not go down well, except in the river.
