A Brief History of Shared Bikes: A Love & Hate Relationship

Shared bikes (gongxiang danche) line almost every street in major Chinese cities, and it has become hard to remember what life was like before the sidewalks became jammed with them.

However, many of us can still recall the days when there were haphazardly piled stacks of bikes blocking walkways around the city.

Over the years, the system has been honed, with designated no-parking areas and easy in-app features for reporting broken bikes, which has alleviated many of the problems the program had in its early days. 

Image via Ai

Now, shared bikes are – for most of us – a convenient and popular way to get around the city, without the hassle of maintaining or worrying about losing a personal bicycle. 

China’s bike sharing market is the largest in the world – it is five times that of India, which is the second largest in the world. There are around 15 million shared bikes lining the streets across China; the majority are operated by Meituan, Hellobike, and Didi Qingdu.

In the last decade, the bike sharing landscape has already seen the rise and fall of multiple companies. Most of those that have survived were absorbed or started by China’s tech giants, such as Hellobike which is run by Alipay.

Image via sohu.com

Since shared bikes are such a fixture of life in China, we decided to dive a bit deeper into the history of how it all began.

Although the concept of bike sharing can be traced back to Amsterdam in the 1960s, China is the pioneer of the modern practice.

Launched in 2008, the Hangzhou Publish Bicycle System was the first bike-sharing system in China. It utilized a fixed docking station with coin and smart-card payment systems.

Hangzhou Public Bike System. Image via Ai

Despite the program’s initial growth, when dockless shared bikes were introduced, the system fell out a favor and we can still see the empty docks of similar programs throughout China.

Dockless smartphone enabled bike sharing began with two major competitors: Mobike and Ofo. Founded in 2014 in Beijing, Ofo was the pioneer of the smartphone app bike-sharing model – in the next few years, dozens of companies would join the market.

Image via Ai

At first, users could sell and share their own bikes, with Ofo repainting them in their signature bright yellow color and adding an Ofo lock to them.

In just four years, Ofo had amassed almost RMB16 billion (USD2.2 billion) in funding before it started facing financial problems after expanding far too aggressively and was forced to shutter many of its offices, creating massive graveyards of redundant bikes. 

As a result, millions of customers waited in a virtual queue to get their deposits back. By 2019, Ofo had filed for bankruptcy and completely collapsed in 2020.

Image via Ai

In 2015, Mobike was founded in Shanghai with funding from Tencent. In the beginning, the bikes cost around RMB6,000 to produce, but they were eventually able to lower the cost to between RMB200-500.

Mobike still exists, but the company rebranded to Meituan Bike after Meituan acquired it in 2018. Not only did Mobike benefit from the fall of Ofo, but the injection of capital following their acquisition also helped them to continue expanding despite massive losses early on.

READ MORE: Every District in Beijing May Soon Have Shared Bikes

Image via Chinadaily

The main problem with the system is environmental waste; there are now massive bike graveyards across the country, but hopefully, recycling programs can eventually alleviate the problem.

As the market becomes more stable, the program has been running more smoothly, and the bikes are now – for the most part – neatly lined along the street.

Although they can be an eyesore, they can also be extremely helpful in getting around traffic jams and traveling short distances around the city – unless you live in mountainous places like Chongqing…

[Cover image via earthdecks.net]