Bike-sharing schemes such as Ofo, oBike, Reddy Go and Airbike have landed in Australian cities, but are they a good idea? Find out more in our article and let us know your thoughts below.
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I saw an item on ABC the other night about vast mountains of bikes being scrapped in China, it seemed mainly due to irresponsible users dumping them all over the place instead of returning them to collection points.
I prefer to ride my own 
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Just in the local vicinity of CHOICE, I’ve seen:
- a user take boltcutters to a bike after the app wouldn’t unlock it
- a bike in the river
- a bike in a tree
- a bike with bent rims
- a bike thrown over a fence and into an electricity sub-station
- another thrown over a fence into the railway reservation
Maybe the idea is more suited to cities where the populace has more respect for property and cyclists ? 
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Appalling!’
Creative, although still appalling and not original.
On Vashon Island (near Seattle, Washington), a tree grows carrying a strange passenger – an old bike. There are a variety of stories about how the bike got into the tree. One story goes, a boy went to war in 1914 and left his bike chained to a tree. He never came home and the family left the bike there as a memorial to the fallen soldier. Another less romantic version is that a kid simply put his bike in the tree decades ago and never picked it up, leaving the tree no choice but to grow around the bike. Then, of course there are those who think the whole think is a hoax and just a tourist attraction.
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Elsewhere, I’ve just read that Google has an issue with its 1100 free bikes being ‘borrowed’ and stolen from its huge Mountain View campus in California…
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In Amsterdam the shared bike system works quite well… like many thing, maybe it just take time for people to get used to it. I’m sure it gets boring throwing bikes in the river/bushes/drains etc after a while.
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In Brisbane, we have a docked system so don’t see the unusual places where bikes are parked for the next user.
Having a docked system has merits, but a major disadvantage of bike collection and drop off places not offen that convenient for all users. But suppose collecting a bike from the tree or local creek is just as inconvenient.
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In Melbourne recently saw a story about many of their bikes were being dumped into the river
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An interesting case study from China about the effects of bike share schemes on traffic congestion:
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We’ve had some reports of people being incorrectly charged for using share bike services. If you’ve checked your bank statement recently and found an error, please let us know.
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Without empirical evidence related to bike shares, but using common sense and comparing world laws, I opine one of the most significant reasons bicycle shares and rentals struggle so badly in Australia are the mandatory helmet rules, no exemptions,
followed by road rules that consider push bikes to be equivalents of motor vehicles for the purposes of regulated road use, also stringently defined. Convenience is in the eye of the beholder, but if using a ‘regulated vehicle’ you no longer need and risk this fine or that fine, the river might reasonably look good to some as a convenience factor.
I am not intending to revisit the efficacy of helmet or road rules, just commenting that anything that inconveniences the customer or consumer is contrary to the ‘products’ success.
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