As the sharing bike phenomenon has swept China, changing the way millions of people across the country travel around cities, some have complained the bikes are dominating free bike-parking areas and bringing stress to those whose job is to keep these areas tidy.
According to a Beijing Evening News report on Wednesday, shared bikes that had been parked in a free bike parking lot of Dongfengbeiqiao subway station had been "hurled" onto a nearby patch of grass.
When asked by a user of bike-sharing firm OFO about whether he could leave his shared bike in the lot, the staff member responsible for the area said that they had been told to remove the bikes and they would be fined if any such bikes are found in the lot by their supervisors.
Seizing spokes
The same story played out in other stations along Beijing Subway Line 10, including at Dahongmen, Shiliuzhuang and Shilihe stations. The workers at these stops all told the Beijing Evening News that they had been told to make private bikes their priority, and would allow shared bikes only if there was enough room.
Shanghai saw even more friction between public infrastructure and shared bikes last week, with a viral video showing some 4,000 shared bikes being seized by the Huangpu district vehicle management department and loaded onto trucks.
The Shanghai-based Jiefang Daily reported on February 28 that over 3,500 of the seized bikes were orange bikes from Mobike, a firm backed by Tencent Holdings and owned by Didi-Chuxing. These bikes were taken off the street despite being parked in designated white boxes drawn on the sidewalk.
The head of the Huangpu vehicle department said that the bikes were removed due to limited space and accused bike-sharing firms of unfairly taking up resources.
Mobike requested their bikes back but this was rejected, said the report.
A later Jiefang Daily report quoted a local grassroots official as saying the boom in shared bikes is testing the city's management capability to its limit.
According to the report, Shanghai has over 280,000 shared bikes from 10 companies on its streets, and this number is expected to top half a million in 2017.
Beijing has over 300,000 such bikes, news portal Chinanews.com reported Friday.
Getting a handle
To relieve congestion, the capital released plans on Thursday which include promises to develop specific management methods to deal with shared bikes.
The Beijing and Shanghai authorities told the Global Times that these methods are still at the "research stage."
Chinanews.com revealed that the Beijing traffic authorities have asked Mobike and OFO to better regulate parking. If they are judged to have failed, the city will carry out an "overall clean-up and rectification" by October this year.
"We are now trying to communicate and collaborate with the government, offices and residential compounds to establish designated parking areas for our bikes," a PR employee at OFO told the Global Times Thursday.
"We have had good experiences with the designated area system as we achieved good outcomes with it in Haizhu district in Guangzhou," the employee added.
However, shared bike users have expressed their concerns about the "designated area" system, saying that neither Beijing nor Shanghai has given enough space to these areas and this has affected the convenience of these bikes.
"It is really hard to locate a 'white box' downtown, it usually takes me a few minutes. I now would rather walk than bike," Yu Hao, a Shanghai cyclist told the Global Times on Thursday.
When asked if the number of shared bikes has overwhelmed the city's urban management capacity, Luo Yameng, a Beijing-based urbanization expert's answer was a firm "no."
"The number of shared bikes will continue to grow as it is still too small to satisfy demand. It does not make sense to talk about the limits of urban management when it is tested, as it is meant to serve the public and its capability should increase in accordance with development," Luo told the Global Times on Friday.
"The livelihood of residents comes first. Urban management should not compromise the development of public services just because they are temporarily overwhelmed," Luo noted.
It is legitimate for governments to charge firms a fee to help with parking costs, Luo suggested.
