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