Bicycle Sharing — Reading

Passage

A The first bicycle-sharing scheme was an act of optimism that failed quickly. In 1965 a group of Amsterdam activists painted fifty bicycles white, left them unlocked around the city and invited anyone to ride them. Within weeks most had been stolen or thrown into the canals. The episode is usually told as a charming footnote, but it established the problem every subsequent scheme has had to solve: a shared bicycle that nobody is accountable for does not stay a shared bicycle for long. B The answer arrived in stages. Copenhagen's 1995 scheme used a coin deposit, which discouraged theft but not much else, since the deposit was worth less than the bike. The decisive change came with identification. Lyon in 2005 and Paris in 2007 required users to register a payment card before their first ride, so that a bicycle taken and not returned could be charged for. Paris deployed roughly twenty thousand machines, an unprecedented scale, and the model spread rapidly. C Pricing in these systems is designed to be counterintuitive. The first half hour is typically free or nearly so, and the cost then rises steeply. The point is not to earn revenue from long rides but to prevent them: a bicycle sitting locked to a rack outside its user's office all day is unavailable to everyone else. The tariff rewards returning the machine quickly, and the whole system's usefulness depends on the fleet turning over several times a day rather than on how many bicycles exist. D Around 2016 a second model appeared. Dockless schemes, developed principally in China, dispensed with stations altogether: a bicycle could be located by app, unlocked, and left anywhere. Growth was extraordinary and brief. Competing operators flooded Chinese cities with machines far in excess of demand, and when the funding stopped the bicycles remained. Photographs of the resulting accumulations — tens of thousands of bicycles stacked in fields on the edges of Shanghai and Guangzhou — became the standard illustration of the model's collapse. E Dockless schemes were not intrinsically unworkable, and regulated versions operate successfully in many cities today. What failed was an absence of limits. Cities that later imposed fleet caps, required parking in marked bays and made operators liable for removing badly parked machines have had considerably better results than those that let operators compete without constraint. F The evidence on whether these schemes reduce car use is weaker than their advocates suggest. Surveys repeatedly find that most shared-bicycle journeys replace walking or public transport rather than driving, which improves neither congestion nor emissions much. The clearer benefits lie elsewhere: solving the last stretch between a station and a destination, extending the effective reach of a transport network, and providing incidental physical activity to people who would not otherwise cycle. G The schemes that endure share unglamorous features. They are integrated with public transport, often on the same ticket. They are dense enough that a station is always close by, since a scheme requiring a ten-minute walk to reach a bicycle will not be used. And they are treated as public infrastructure with public subsidy, rather than as businesses expected to profit from fares. Where any of that is missing, the bicycles tend to end up somewhere unhelpful — in a canal, or a field outside Shanghai. H The dockless model that briefly flooded Chinese cities in the mid-2010s illustrates the failure mode particularly starkly. Freed from the cost of building docking stations, several operators competed by simply flooding cities with bicycles, on the theory that whichever company achieved the greatest density of coloured bikes on every corner would win the largest market share. The result was overproduction on a scale that outran any plausible level of demand: aerial photographs of vacant lots in Xiamen and Shanghai, stacked with tens of thousands of unused bicycles from failed operators, became a recognisable symbol of the excesses of venture-funded growth. Several of the companies involved had raised very large sums from investors on user-growth metrics that took no account of whether a ride was ever profitable, a financing pattern later repeated in other subscription and sharing services well beyond transport. The bicycles themselves were mechanically often quite sound; the failure was entirely commercial, a reminder that a scheme can solve the engineering problem of urban cycling and still collapse on the ordinary problem of matching supply to demand.

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