How Should Cities Improve Dockless Bike-Sharing Services?
Recently, transport authorities in Guangzhou in south China’s Guangdong Province released information that it had conducted talks with bike-sharing companies with business in the city, demanding that they suspend the deployment of new bicycles until they have rectifi ed and improved their current practices.
In April, in order to keep the bike-sharing service in order, the city’s transport bureau issued a tender where companies like Mobike and Hellobike won certain quotas. However, it has now been found that these firms are not making efforts to improve their operation modes, which has led to pileups of bicycles that damage the image of the city and disrupt public transport.
Many people have voiced their opinions on how to rein in the reckless sprawling of shared bikes in urban areas so that the service can better satisfy users’ needs while at the same time integrate into city transport.
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Integration ahead of quantity
Zi Chang (Nanfang Daily ):Shared bicycles can often be seen scattered everywhere on city streets, diminishing their positive function and causing many cities to prohibit the entry of bike-sharing companies. This should be partly blamed on relevant watchdogs for their underestimation of these bikes’ negative impact on urban order and also their slow response to the mess they have caused. Bike-sharing fi rms, especially at the start of development, are so eager to win clients that they almost totally neglect the management of their bicycles.
Years have passed since this business emerged, but old problems still linger. The focus of these fi rms should be shifted from quantity to integration with cities’ public management.
So why is the scene still so messy? The answer is that either these firms are not really paying attention to this problem or they have yet to find an effective solution. Indeed, to acquire a large number of users and high frequency use is crucial for these companies’ survival, but in the long run, the key to the industry’s development is effective bike management so that they will become a natural part of a city’s public transport.
At the beginning of its development, the bike-sharing service was acclaimed as an innovative, low carbon transport and Internet Plus application. However, its edge should not be limited to the concept level, but should also extend to real-time operation. It’s supposed to balance effi ciency, urban public order and service supply. Therefore, an innovative concept is not enough; there must also be technological and management innovation to match it.
In the early days, it was understandable that bike-sharing companies were not experienced enough to cope with the business, thus they recklessly deployed huge numbers of bikes onto the streets.
任何事物都不是绝对的，电动牙刷也是有相对的缺点，电动牙刷震动快，使用不当会磨损牙齿，电动牙刷采用旋转运动的方式刷牙，需要在三个牙面停留一段时间，如果控制不好时间和放置牙刷的角度，很容易伤到牙龈和牙根；市面上的电动牙刷质量参差不齐，牙刷材料和工艺有所差别，部分出现摩擦大、震动不稳定的问题。
Healthier model needed
In this sense, stringent regulation is sometimes effective protection for startups, rather than suppression. As we can see, to let the bikesharing startups do whatever they want is the major reason why they are now facing such diffi culties.
Actually, before the current problems, some cities had tried to adopt measures to curb the bike sprawl. However, at the time, public opinion was on the side of the new fi rms, arguing that the innovation should not be killed in the cradle. Now we have realized that those proposed measures were farsighted.
When it comes to society, the shrinking of dockless bike-sharing services is also a boon. The past three years have seen shared bikes clogging streets and invading urban space. It is a huge waste of resources. According to statistics from Beijing’s transport authorities, of the more than 1.9 million shared bikes in the city, more than half were not used for over a month.
The waning tide of shared bike services in cities does not necessarily mean a failure of this innovation. Rather, it reflects the maturing of this sector.
As far as the whole bike-sharing sector is concerned, this declining mania is good news. Since its birth, the bike-sharing service—with high investor expectations—has never developed an efficient operation model. Its boom was often based on discounts, subsidies and even company losses. Price hikes will help to bring the price to a reasonable level and better refl ect cost. More importantly, this will save a lot of resources that would otherwise be wasted. The practice will help with the long-term development of the business.
Liu Zhiqiang (People’s Daily ):Some cities have taken actions to standardize dockless bike-sharing services in their cities in a bid to ban random docking and vandalism. At the same time, groaning under pressure, some bike-sharing companies are secretly raising their prices instead of continuing to offer subsidies for the use of their bikes.
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Of course, tough regulation is not equal to arbitrary management that may throttle innovation. We need targeted and effective measures. On the one hand, there should be enough tolerance for startups based on careful regulating. On the other hand, there must be a bottom line and startups should not be allowed to expand recklessly.
Given various forms of the sharing economy today, regulations should target two things: order and potential risk.
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The deployment of shared bikes will inevitably invade public land and space. All cities have their urban management regulations and rules to follow, so they should also impose these existing regulations on the shared bike industry. As for risks, we know that millions of users are now waiting for their deposits to be refunded from failing bike-sharing fi rms, thus, in order to protect users’ interests, there must be enough transparency about where their deposits have gone. Relevant authorities must take tangible actions to curb such risks.
After the birth and success of shared bike services, the concept of shared motorbikes was a very hot topic among startups. Fortunately, considering road order and safety, many cities have denied this model or limited them to certain areas. As a result, they have avoided the fate of other shared bikes and also the waste of resources. We hope to see more of this kind of timely and effective regulation so that the sharing economy can follow a healthier model of development.
Improving urban management
Chen Qingbiao (www.cenews.com.cn): It’s time to rectify the policies regarding shared bicycle services. Frankly speaking, since the birth of this new service, neither economic profits nor social benefi ts have been satisfactory. Some companies have defaulted on users’ deposits and have managed to survive only on venture capital. This implies that the current shared bicycle service model is unsustainable. If the service is allowed to expand under its current model, it will pose huge challenges to urban management, especially to order on the streets. In other words, the current urban management model can’t bear this type of operation model.
Of course, shared bicycle services are not without merits. In big cities, some areas are inaccessible by public transport or even taxi. In this case, these bikes play a particularly useful role. However, the limited marginal benefit stemming from this kind of convenience is not enough to offset the huge marginal cost created by the mess and waste of this operation model. This problem is increasingly striking in cities that have a large deployment of shared bikes. Convenience for a limited number of users is gained at the expense of the vast majority of the city, thus it is high time urban management and transport authorities tackle this issue.
No matter how the problem is solved, social management cost will inevitably rise. If relevant companies bear the cost, that would be the best solution. If the cost is distributed among taxpayers, it means everyone is paying for the convenience of a small number of users and the mess the shared bike service has caused.
Currently, since there is still no successful shared bicycle service model that complements urban management, the expansion of this service should be halted. If possible, relevant firms should try to redeploy their existing bicycles in a more rational way and improve their operation so that existing bikes can be better used to minimize the waste of resources. Even in some fi rst- and second-tier cities, some users still feel their demand for shared bicycles is not being met, therefore, this gap can be fi lled by the proper redeployment of existing bicycles instead of flooding the streets with more bikes.
To a large extent, it’s due to the lack of effective supervision and regulation that shared bicycle firms are recklessly expanding their business while paying no attention to bike management. If a quota is assigned based on companies’ managerial capability and actual performance, then the impulse to sprawl the service can be curbed. The moderate development of this service system will satisfy some people’s demand for bikes while keeping urban transport in order.
Copyedited by Rebeca Toledo