I am an avid walker. Every morning as the sun rises I go for a long walk around my suburb of Ashburton. No matter what route I take – the Gardiners Creek trail, the local golf course, the Anniversary Trail, or through side streets – I am regularly confronted with abandoned oBikes.
In fact, during the recent Clean Up Australia Day, around half a dozen obikes were fished out of Gardiners Creek in the small stretch near the East Malvern Golf Course.
It’s the same around the world, as reported recently in The Guardian:
… 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.
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Today, the Victorian Government has dealt a potentially deadly blow to oBikes, with abandoned bikes to now be classified and litter and potentially liable for $3,000 fines. From The Australian:
Victoria’s Environmental Protection Agency will put out a litter abatement order on oBikes dumped in streets and rivers from June 6.
The bike share company will have two hours to remove individual bikes left in the street, or receive a $3000 fine.
They will have 24 hours to remove clusters of bikes, and seven days to take oBikes out of rivers and creeks, or receive they fine.
EPA chief executive Nial Finegan told Melbourne’s 3AW radio he was left with little choice as oBikes had not been co-operating with his agency.
“We’ve tried to work with oBikes, we’ve written to them, we’ve tried to get information through statutory notices, and so on, to little avail,” he said.
“$3000 per bike. That should encourage them to run their service in a more appropriate way and stop annoying people in Melbourne.”
While a nice idea in theory, oBikes introduction in Australia have clearly not gone down well and looks to be on borrowed time.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
