(RIDICULOUS PHOTOS FROM CHINA) - The 'Shared Bike' Graveyards of Doom

in #blog6 years ago (edited)

For this post I'm going to start off the photo series quite tame, and build up to full on ridiculous, so if you can't be bothered, just scroll to the bottom half!

So for those who don't know, China had an idea that boomed. Shared Bikes. But not any old shared bikes. These are cheap shared bikes that you can park and pick up anywhere, tracked with GPS on your mobile app.

For a while I was skeptical; how on earth can they be secure? People would surely just remove the locks and have themselves a free bike! Failing that they'd just lock the bikes with their own locks to guarantee a bike waiting outside of their home every morning.

Well, my suspicions were absolutely right, and when trying it out, I found dozens of bikes that were miraculously 5 stories up in somebody's apartment, or bound tightly to a tree.

Nonetheless, they were SO cheap, it didn't even matter. The company, Mobike, could just keep churning them out, thousands at a time. Each user had to put a 200RMB ($50) deposit on to sign up, which the company presumably left it all to accrue interest over time in some big bank.

This seemed to be a very successful business model, because within seemingly a couple of months, they were everywhere, and new colours - new companies - started following suit. Ofo, the yellow ones, are probably the most popular today and have started expanding in the the UK, USA and others across the world.

There were others, including blue bikes, green bikes, green electrical bikes, white free-to-ride bikes, gold and even rainbow coloured bikes. (Names: bluegogo, Yibu, Xiaoming, Youbike, Qibei)

This... became a problem.

That's a lot of companies churning out disposable bikes.

A LOT of bikes

In fact, there are now so many shared bikes that every location you can store your bikes are completely full and indeed overflowing with shared bikes, with only a few regular, owned bikes getting an opportunity to fit into the nooks and crannies. On several occasions I've found the street completely blocked with a random pile of bikes 3 metres high - I'm not kidding.

Naturally, spaces where you shouldn't park your bike started filling up too and it became the job of the city councils to clean up the mess by way of dozens of trucks collecting hundreds at a time and... disposing of them. But where can you possibly put them?? As you will now see... there just isn't enough room in the world.

The Graveyards.

Introducing, The Shared Bike Graveyards; a monument to human excess, a nationwide epidemic.


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Nope. This is not a one-off location. Let's keep 'em coming:

At a certain point, they literally become a part of the landscape, the geography of the city:

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Some have taken more creative approaches with the material:

Some of the graveyards can be quite... artistic?


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In fact, just around the corner from my place is a dumpling restaurant filled with chairs made from bike wheels and seats, handlebar decorations and so forth from the Mobike company.

Other info

This has more complications than you might actually imagine. The sheer manpower and total hours needed, for example, to actually search, take and dump these bikes in plots of land must be practically crippling smaller communities. Meanwhile in Shanghai, some bike graveyards such as the picture above by the old house, are sitting on plots of land that go for 100,000RMB ($15,000) per square metre!

In total, there are about 60 start ups, with fewer than 10 expected to last the year.

Ofo, the most successful, have an estimated 10 million bikes around China and is worth $3 billion, with over 65 million active monthly users. Ofo is the only one that has managed to spread widely around the globe, so far in 20 countries including multiple cities in the USA, Spain, Australia, France, South Korea and so on.

Mobike, the runner up, managed to raise a billion dollars in a year of fundraising, and tripled that to match the value of Ofo at 3 billion dollars within the same month.

Opinion

So is this ridiculous phenomenon a benefit to society or a plague? I can't really say. I can say that I super enjoy that I can just leave my house or basically anywhere and just... see a bike to pick up waiting across the street, and I love that it costs me about 50 cents or less - sometimes free - per ride.

But the ecological impact of manufacturing alone is probably worse for the environment than any improvement we might see from people adopting a biker lifestyle, so there's that.

But hey, give it a year or so and these monster bike piles will come to a town near you! So let me know what you think when the time comes =)

Photos are Public Domain or acquired by sources that persistently steal content without a second thought in a country that steals literally trillions of dollars of intellectual data from the US alone - unless otherwise stated - and so my conscience is clean

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That's a lot of bikes.

This begs for a proposed solution.

#onebikepolicy ?

Well the system is a loophole for such a thing really, since it's all shared, it's all technically one bike each. Frankly it's surprising they didn't come up with a shared-baby initiative back in the one-child policy days!

This is an eye opener. It's in equal parts extraordinary and tragic.

a monument to human excess

What better way is there to put it?
Where I live in the UK we're having quite a problem with disposable plastics of various kinds being on everything, but it's got to the stage where you simply cannot buy the items you want without such plastic wrapped or boxed around it.

I fear that while it's cheap, fast and easy to manufacture, there will be no stopping plagues as yours and mine. I just hope common sense outweighs convenience before it's too late.

All the best from a duck in London 😊

Hah well I'm British too, just living in China so I get the... best? of both worlds! Thanks for reading =)

Let's just call it the best of both worlds until it all comes crashing down, then we can rethink it! 😆

Crazy shit. In principle a great idea, but it didn't take into account human behavior, it seems...

Yep. The funny thing is, the whole 'shared' concept blew up in general to things like shared Umbrellas - which just got stolen in their thousands. Also shared sports cars and even shared women to accompany men shopping:

Only 20 cents a trip!

Fuck. Just fuck.

I could have saved a lot of time and just put this.... very succinct

succint! that's a sexy word. Thanks, it has been assimilated.

Assimilated... or Subsumed?

stop it. you had your good moment for this month

fuck it. Just copied your memoirs idea. There, two good moments. Give yourself a good pat in the back.

It will soon liter everywhere in so much quantity that people may wish this did not start. In my country we have what we call "pure water" which is just a name of water sealed in plastic sachets. People so much fell in love with it. Here's a picture of a dumpster littered with the plastics from the pure water epidemic.

The thing just took a life of its own and is now the number one thing you'd see in a dumpster. Prior to 1999, refuse dumps have lesser plastics here.

That's pretty incredible. The UK is going through a plastic crisis at the moment too (You can read in a comment below also). Interestingly, the release of the Blue Planet II nature documentary made people so hyper-aware of it that there's a big movement to use as little plastic as possible there now... but even so it's practically impossible...

Governments need to take more action than just depending on the people I think...

It's only government policies that can change that. I remember an African government, I think Kenya, that banned the use of plastic as packaging materials both in shops and in the bakery. They imposed heavy tax on plastic material that made it quite unfavorable for any intending user.

Yep, India has some great innovations too. It's a shame it's mostly up to the developing countries to sort this shit out when the rich countries clearly have the resources to do something about it... -___-

Wow! It really is such a sorry sight @mobbs. The environmental impact of the initiative was obviously not considered when the profit level and convenience aspect of mass bike production was being looked into. In the real sense one can only ride one bike at a time.
So, asides the very one bike, others are somewhat of a nuisance, especially if you don't visit the other sites housing the other bikes frequently, via the park and pickup system.

China typically forgets to consider the impact of, well, anything beyond 5 minutes in the future unless it relates to the longevity of the Communist Party. Sigh.

Lolz.....You sound like you are simply 'tolerating' the place @mobbs. You don't sound like you are enjoying your time there.

Well, I'm not here because it's China. I'm actually in my own bubble of life in spite of it, so the life I have here is generally quite good. But it does make me very aware of the stuff outside my bubble...

I never realised just how big this was! I never even thought about the grave side of the bikes! I think over this way it will be better regulated, like companies responsible to clean their old shit away... but I'd kinda like a bike graveyard to wonder around :) I'd love to just hop on a bike anytime, would make me go out a lot more :D

Yeah it's clearly already controlled in the other countries but would be funny to see it explode into hell like this... Just makes me wonder where they get all the materials from! Bikes are hard to recycle!

China is weird af. At first I was like, what could go wrong with this idea.

Wouldn't it be better to sell those bikes to underdeveloped countries? but i guess the shipping cost may outweigh the price of the bike itself.

It's a pretty good idea, and I don't know... probably yeah, China isn't the most charitable country, A study on people's charitable attitudes around the world:

Strikingly India ranked at 134 and China at 147 - with Chinese people among the least likely on the planet to volunteer. Only 4% said they would.

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