3 ms·

I am currently living in Shanghai and I use Mobike, Ofo, or 赶赶单车 to get to work everyday. I have logged over 250km between the services. This article is largel

I am currently living in Shanghai and I use Mobike, Ofo, or 赶赶单车 to get to work everyday. I have logged over 250km between the services. This article is largely unfair. The city has large swaths of sidewalk established as bike parking zones. I can almost always find a bike zone within 10-50m. Furthermore, there are almost always parking attendants and security guards outside of malls and subway stations ensuring that bikes are parked correctly. Even when these people aren't present, I rarely ever see bikes anywhere but the bike zones. And as much space as the bikes take up, it is NOTHING compared to the parked cars along the streets. Furthermore, I see company trucks collecting and relocating bikes multiple times per week. They are constantly shifting bikes of high supply to areas of demand. There are certain times of day (eg Saturday night at the Bund) where there are untold legions of bikes, but car traffic is flowing well. Many of the trips that I've taken on a Mobike were out of convenience. In American cities the fastest mode of transportation is almost always a car. However, because the bikes are essentially door-to-door with no delay, I can almost always beat a hired car because there is no delay and I can zip between waiting traffic. Chinese cities are being strangled to death by the crazy growth in car traffic. There has been insane immigration to cities and average income has gone way up. The net effect is a lot more car usage. Every taxi driver I have complains about the ever-worsening traffic conditions, year-over-year trip times increasing etc. Bike sharing does A LOT to alleviate this by providing a convenient, quick, and cheap ($0.10-0.20 / 30min) method to travel. This is all ignoring the obvious ecological impact of the many tons of CO2 not released by the saved hydrocarbon fueled trips.

sberder 9y ago
Living in Shanghai, closing on 2000km on mobike only. Try going to the flower market on wanhangdu lu and you'll get an idea of the abuse of both bikes and pavement. I love the service and I think it's a fantastic alternative to pubic transports/taxi/DiDi but you can't deny the absolute lack of care of a lot of users. I regularly see: * Bikes locked with a separate lock * Bikes parked inside compounds you can't access * Bikes parked inside a building on any given floor (it's normal here for people to park their bike or electric scooter just outside their door even in high rise) * Bikes parked on the street in the middle of traffic Even with those behaviors, those companies have completely reshaped the way people move in Chinese cities.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sr_fahrenheit 9y ago
  This mirrors my experience in Berlin. In nice neighbourhoods you see the bikes parked nicely, in rougher ones like where I live you often see them scattered on the road, half broken. Being Berlin, I bet there's also lots of anti-capitalist rage against them - I see a lot of them around my train station with a flat back wheel and I suspect it's from the same angry person, and all this started happening when they got rebranded from DB-bikes (DB is the national train company, someone correct me if it's actuall private) into Lidl bikes and got rid of the requirement of parking at docking stations at the same time that more companies started appearing. I bet also if you go to Frankfurt or München you don't see this kind of carnage.
barry-cotter 9y ago
I largely concur. I think the bike parking zones pre-date the bike sharing startups but they've been expanded and get more use now. Unfortunately there are plenty of people who leave the bikes in their compounds but as problems go that's pretty small and will become even less of a problem once they decide to ramp up enforcement over growth. If the NYT wanted to run a piece about Chinese manners and consideration they could have found a better subject for a hit piece easily.
Markoff 9y ago
Shanghai ain't China, heck I've been Beijinger for many years and even I was shocked when i went there for business trip to see people waiting for green light at junction.

sberder 9y ago

Living in Shanghai, closing on 2000km on mobike only. Try going to the flower market on wanhangdu lu and you'll get an idea of the abuse of both bikes and pavement. I love the service and I think it's a fantastic alternative to pubic transports/taxi/DiDi but you can't deny the absolute lack of care of a lot of users. I regularly see: * Bikes locked with a separate lock * Bikes parked inside compounds you can't access * Bikes parked inside a building on any given floor (it's normal here for people to park their bike or electric scooter just outside their door even in high rise) * Bikes parked on the street in the middle of traffic Even with those behaviors, those companies have completely reshaped the way people move in Chinese cities.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sr_fahrenheit 9y ago
This mirrors my experience in Berlin. In nice neighbourhoods you see the bikes parked nicely, in rougher ones like where I live you often see them scattered on the road, half broken. Being Berlin, I bet there's also lots of anti-capitalist rage against them - I see a lot of them around my train station with a flat back wheel and I suspect it's from the same angry person, and all this started happening when they got rebranded from DB-bikes (DB is the national train company, someone correct me if it's actuall private) into Lidl bikes and got rid of the requirement of parking at docking stations at the same time that more companies started appearing. I bet also if you go to Frankfurt or München you don't see this kind of carnage.

barry-cotter 9y ago

I largely concur. I think the bike parking zones pre-date the bike sharing startups but they've been expanded and get more use now. Unfortunately there are plenty of people who leave the bikes in their compounds but as problems go that's pretty small and will become even less of a problem once they decide to ramp up enforcement over growth. If the NYT wanted to run a piece about Chinese manners and consideration they could have found a better subject for a hit piece easily.

Markoff 9y ago

Shanghai ain't China, heck I've been Beijinger for many years and even I was shocked when i went there for business trip to see people waiting for green light at junction.