Better management needed to improve bike-sharing service

On Thursday, Beijing's transportation management authorities called a halt to new station-less, hire-on-demand "shared" bikes in the city, where some 2.35 million such bikes are being run by 15 companies. Legal Daily commented on Saturday:

The surge in the number of shared bikes has caused parking chaos, as Beijing now has one bike for every 14 residents, a lot more than what a city needs to promote green public transportation. Twelve cities, including four first-tier ones, have suspended new dispatches of shared bikes and, instead, are focusing on keeping the existing ones in order.

In July, the Ministry of Transport said there were nearly 70 bike-sharing operators, with 16 million bikes and more than 130 million registered users, in the country. The ratio of bikes is particularly high in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, posing a serious challenge to urban management.

Many are surprised to see the bike-sharing business boom in less than a year, let alone spread to overseas markets such as the United Kingdom and Japan. Bolstering its success is the fact that Chinese urban commuters are all for bike sharing, especially because it solves the last-mile problem. But illegal parking and oversupply of bikes followed the dog-eat-dog competition between bike-sharing companies. Which could become a nightmare for urban transportation authorities and the Achilles' heel of bike-sharing service providers.

Enthusiastic investors empowered Mobike and its rivals to expand continuously and grab early shares quite rapidly. Their failure to keep shared bikes in order shows the companies lack the means of managing their expansion. As an internet-driven innovation, the bike-sharing business requires smarter, more organized management.

Bike-on-hire platforms should work harder to ensure orderly dispatch of bikes and regulated expansion of service. Credit deduction and blacklisting ill-behaved users, too, could make a difference. And local governments, on their part, must monitor bike-sharing operators and make sure the deposits they collect from the users are in safe hands.