Chinese Startup Mobike Lost More Than 200,000 Bikes in 2019 (bbc.com) 71
Chinese startup Mobike has announced that it lost more than 200,000 bikes in 2019. From a report: The company said in a blog that 205,600 "dockless" bikes were lost to theft and vandalism. In 2018, it pulled out of Manchester after a series of incidents. Shared dockless bikes, which are hired via an app, have become commonplace in cities worldwide over the last few years. Companies like Uber, Lime and Ofo have all put shared bikes on city streets, as have some local councils. In China, thousands of shared bikes have ended up in huge scrapheaps, leading to questions about whether there is demand for them.
not shared (Score:5, Insightful)
rented
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Rental is a sharing scheme. Nothing is free, someone has to pay somehow. Granted, generally someone is trying to get rich, and that inflates prices, but if multiple parties are making use of a resource, that's sharing.
Shared And Rented (Score:2)
Of course they are in demand! They wouldn't be destroyed a such rates (for write-offs) if they weren't.
Re: Shared And Rented (Score:2)
2020 (Score:4, Funny)
I will assume mo bike will lose mo bikes in 2020.
Sounds like... (Score:3)
Ride it like you stole it! Because you stole it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The surest way to see something go to shit is to remove ownership. This is the tragedy of the commons at play when people can't be bothered to take care of a shared resource, no matter what it is. I keep hearing people misuse the tragedy of the commons to support government intervention, but the government *IS* the commons.
A bike share service might work if the people involved felt real ownership. This mean empowering the people to choose which bikes were in the service, who would be allowed to take part, and (this is important) seeing some kind of benefit from the costs of the upkeep.
Most car rental services generally work well because before a person can rent a car there is someone there to do an inspection before it leaves and again when it is returned. The people renting the car will take the name of the driver, take a deposit, check for a valid license and insurance, among other things to make sure the car comes back and in still working order. Even then there are stories of cars being returned with evidence of all kinds of odd things that happened to them.
Without this accountability then you get people that will abuse a shared resource.
I've also heard of how government intervention only makes things worse. One was a "traffic tax" as a means to lower traffic in old downtown areas. The idea was that the city blocked off roads into certain segments of cities and only allowed in city buses and those that paid an entry fee, a fee based on the size of the vehicle and how many people were in it. A car carrying only a driver paid a higher fee than a charter bus full of sightseers. This only made things worse because now that people paid a fee then they thought this gave them permission to go downtown alone in their car. I'm sure some people chose to not pay the fee and instead took the bus but for the most part people thought that if they paid for the opportunity then it must be permissible to act as they did before. People used to simply avoid the high traffic areas because they didn't want to deal with the traffic, if they had little choice but to drive then they'd go in and get out as quickly as they could. Since they paid for admission now they want their money's worth, and so they stay as long as they want, which only adds to the problems of traffic and air quality. Raise the price of admission then you get people even more motivated to stay once they've paid.
Since this is about offering bikes as a means to lower crowding on city streets, and to reduce air pollution, then I'll give another tactic that is bound to fail to get the desired result. Carbon taxes. I'd like to see someone come up with a price for this carbon tax. If X gallons of gasoline produces Y pounds of CO2 in the air, and it would take Z dollars to remove that CO2 from the air, then let's put that into place as a tax. Presumably the government collects this Z dollars and uses that to pay for the operation of sequestration equipment for Y pounds of CO2 in the air, but I've yet to see a case of a government doing any such thing with carbon taxes they collect. People will simply drive as they did with the confidence that now the government will simply offset their emissions.
Go ahead, internalize the externality of CO2 emissions with a carbon tax. I'll just laugh when it fails to lower CO2 emissions.
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If it stays high long enough, or people know it will. They will buy smaller and/or more efficient cars (also electric now). This is all old news, decades old now.
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Gas is expensive, people use less. It's not rocket surgery.
People don't like taxes and will vote against them. It's not rocket surgery.
Sure, people will put up with a lot of taxes before they get real upset. If there's going to be any meaningful reduction in the burning of petroleum fuels then it's going to take more than artificially rising the costs to dissuade people from buying it. There has to be alternatives.
If it stays high long enough, or people know it will. They will buy smaller and/or more efficient cars (also electric now). This is all old news, decades old now.
How much of the CO2 from human activity comes from people commuting to work? If this link and my math are right it's less than 20%
https://www.epa.gov [epa.gov]
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What happens when people buy more fuel efficient cars? They tend to drive more.
Is that really the case? It sounds plausible, but it turns out a lot of the kilometers we drive are necessary: i.e. they are not trips that we gan easily forego, nor do they have viable alternative modes of transport like biking or public transport. If the price elasticity of transport by car really was that high, then the opposite should hold true as well: not having fuel efficient cars or raising the price of gas should lower the number of kilometers we drive. Turns out it doesn't really... our gas pr
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Rubbish, it's well known that people drive less when gas is expensive. See the great recession and the oil crisis.
Those examples prove nothing. People without jobs aren't driving to work every day. An oil shortage leaves people without the option but to lower their miles driven.
US gas is very cheap compared to most places.
The fuel is cheaper in the USA because it's not taxed near as much compared to many other nations.
Guess which country has less efficient transport. Yep the USA.
The USA is a very large and still quite rural nation, this means people have to drive much further more often. This also means a lot of fuel is burned to move products by air, train, and trucks instead of the far more efficient transport by water
Re:Ride it like you stole it! Because you stole it (Score:4, Insightful)
So fucking exceptional you must be to still give yourselves a free pass when it comes to saving the planet.
Go to hell.
I'm taking this seriously. I taking this far more seriously than the Democrats. They want to shutdown all the nuclear power plants and demolish every hydroelectric dam. You want to see CO2 emissions rise then that's how to do it. Trump did more to lower CO2 emissions in the last three years than the Democrats did in the last three decades. We are finally seeing new prototypes for next generation nuclear power getting built. We are seeing more natural gas replacing coal. Democrats don't want to talk about this because that only makes them look bad.
There is no reducing CO2 emissions by making energy more expensive. What lowers CO2 emissions is giving low CO2 alternatives that are cheaper than the high CO2 energy we use now.
There was a news article I read recently about a bunch of knuckleheads that were protesting a coal power plant they forced to keep open. It would have converted to natural gas if they had not protested the gas line they needed to convert it to natural gas. They would have put in more windmills but without natural gas turbines as backup they couldn't afford to build them.
I'm seeing a local nuclear power plant threatening to close because they weren't offered the same carbon credits as the windmills. If it shuts down, and Congress doesn't open Yucca Mountain to dispose of the radioactive material, then it will become a radioactive waste dump. This will cost a lot of money to It will mean a coal power plant getting built to supply the power this already operating and very safe nuclear power plant could have provided for another 20 years.
Just go to hell. If the Democrats took this problem seriously for once then we'd have the problem solved. We need new nuclear power. We need a proper radioactive material processing facilities to convert the piles of "spent" fuel into new fuel, and extract valuable isotopes needed for medicine, space exploration, and industrial uses. Instead we had the Democrats hold up the processing of plutonium we had for so long that we were deemed as non-compliant on a treaty signed with Russia. So not only do we still have a radioactive waste problem but also we just gave Russia permission to restart their nuclear weapons program. We could have turned these old nuclear weapon cores into gobs of carbon free energy but instead we made the problem worse.
Democrats bitch, moan, scream, and complain about nuclear weapons but do everything they can to stop anyone from doing anything about it. If there's going to be the irreversible destruction of these nuclear weapons then it has to be done with a nuclear reactor. Plutonium is an artificial isotope, and it takes a lot of work to make it but not a lot of work to dig it up. No matter where you put it on this planet, other than in the core of a nuclear reactor, means it is a risk for someone to turn it into a weapon for thousands of years. If we are going to destroy this plutonium then we should at least get some energy from it.
You must think you are so fucking exceptional because you fooled yourself into thinking electric trains and solar panels will solve the problem of global warming. It won't. It's more complicated than that. If the Democrats in the USA took this seriously then we'd see the USA be a nation with one of the lowest CO2 emissions per capita instead of one of the highest.
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Plenty of blame from both parties
Nope, only Democrats to blame on global warming.
They've been anti-nuclear power since Carter. Before that a large portion of our electricity was from hydro, and plenty of fuel for heat and other uses was from biomass. Biomass was so popular as a fuel that the Ford Model T was designed to run on ethanol as much as gasoline. This ended with Prohibition though. Prohibition of alcohol likely set back biomass fuel research 100 years. Well, the poor energy density of biomass likely did more against it but a
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If USA shuts down tomorrow, completely just vanished, your precious world would still be fucked by global warming because the other actors aren't doing anything. China and India are only producing more, not less, and this isn't going to change.
So we may be the worse of the worse, but we are actually working on our problems and are heading in the correct direction.
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Is that really the case?
It's certainly something people are debating. Here's something I found with a quick search of the internet.
https://www.citylab.com/transp... [citylab.com]
It sounds plausible, but it turns out a lot of the kilometers we drive are necessary: i.e. they are not trips that we gan easily forego, nor do they have viable alternative modes of transport like biking or public transport.
Which is why a carbon tax will fail to reduce CO2 emissions.
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You think when gas becomes expensive they will use their gas guzzling car over the more efficient car they already own? LOL.
Yes, because they own that gas guzzler for a reason. I see this often around here, people have two or three vehicles. Often its like this, a little car for daily driving, a truck for hauling and bad weather, and perhaps a third being a minivan that the whole family can fit in.
I did read the link, and if rising fuel costs drove people to buy exclusively fuel efficient vehicles then it failed.
liar. It's virtually the opposite of your claim... (Score:1)
The new paper finds that this backlash-like behavior, combined with attribute substitution, contributed to the 60 percent loss in fuel savings.
So 40% of the savings.
Meanwhile, the decline of gas prices in recent years has eroded the appeal of fuel-efficient cars.
Even though the gas pries didn't even increase. But declined instead...
Just imagine what would have happend if gas prices rose instead. If you had actually bothered to read and understand the link you claim to have read...instead of just pretending to have read it, how much less of a total douche you would look like...
As always you are full of shit.
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Gas is expensive, people use less. It's not rocket surgery.
In a nation where people are free to vote there's little incentive for any politician to impose a carbon tax. Any carbon tax that is imposed to artificially raise the price of petroleum fuels can be removed in the next election.
Of course people use less CO2 when it's more expensive. Are you WindBourne level stupid?
I'm not stupid enough to think people will vote themselves a new tax.
People driving around is the biggest cause of CO2 in America, and it's increasing, since gas is so cheap. Transport in America is one of the few things that has been increasing the last few years.A carbon tax will put a dent in this as obvious as the sun rising tomorrow.
A dent that will disappear as growth in transportation continues.
If you want to see a lasting and significant reduction in CO2 emissions then you need a better idea than a carbon tax. The most likely source of rea
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Carbon tax would help all those things happen faster.
No, it won't.
You really think that we don't have alternatives for petroleum because of a lack of motivation? Oil, coal, and gas trade makes up multi-trillion dollars of trade every year. Someone that can go in and just get a tiny sample of this with a carbon neutral transportation will be a multi-millionaire overnight.
People doing this research need energy too, you know that don't you? They need to travel, get equipment and materials shipped to them, etc. and this all happens with transportation that bur
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Not a fool or a liar.
Ah, both then.
Carbon tax, spend the money on nukes. Solved.
You are correct, the problem is solved. Now all we need is the Democrats out of the way so people can build the nuclear power plants.
(You think all the money people are not spending on a carbon tax now is all 100% being spent solving the problem of too much CO2. No, you are living in a fantasy. People could do more.
People can always do more. The problem is not a lack of money, it's a lack of licenses to build nuclear power plants.
You think making carbon more expensive will have any other affect than making people use less, or at worst use the same?
I fear it will mean people use less. If people are using less energy then that means the economy is contracting. Until those nuclear power plants are built we need to be burning fuel, only after we have these built should we see reductions in C
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It is also probably the easiest way to get "user pays" which is something Americans seem to want for some things (healthcare comes to mind) even though that may not be the most efficient or economical way to do somethi
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Two things.
The "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law. It is something that could and can be observed under certain circumstances, but nothing that wouldn't be avoidable.
This is not at all "about offering bikes as a means to lower crowding on city streets, and to reduce air pollution". Within the boundaries of the existing economic system, there never is any other company purpose than profit. And, of course, in a period in which CO2 reduction is hip, companies will use reducing CO2 as a guise for the
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The "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law. It is something that could and can be observed under certain circumstances, but nothing that wouldn't be avoidable.
The tragedy of the commons can be avoided by avoiding the commons. As in with private ownership. There's other means to avoid this, but none so effective as private ownership. In cases where private ownership is impossible, such as with air and water pollution, then means that do not require government intervention are often more effective, and lower in costs, because they avoid creating another tragedy of the commons that is government intervention.
Within the boundaries of the existing economic system, there never is any other company purpose than profit.
Agreed. The bike rental company can't make money unles
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Without this accountability then you get people that will abuse a shared resource.
Well, Mobike does have a system for accountability. FTFA:
Mobike, which rebranded to Meituan Bike this year, thanked the 189,000-plus users who reported stolen and damaged bikes.
The Beijing-based firm, which has orange and silver bikes, has a credit score system which rewards and punishes users for good and bad behaviour.
Charges are imposed on those who break the rules. Some offenders are banned from the service or reported to the police.
Police in Beijing arrested 2,600 people in relation to bike theft and vandalism, according to Mobike's blog, which was posted in Chinese and includes a graphic of a police officer arresting a bike vandal.
I'm guessing that a few of those 2,600 folks might have wanted to retaliate against Mobike, and tossed some of the bikes into rivers.
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Cheap? If I forget to redock a BlueBike (I don't 100% always take my own road bike, though it's much nicer.), they charge $2.50 for being 3 minutes late (did that recently, went on a 48 minute ride instead of a 45 minute one), which rapidly ramps up the price..and the cost of a lost or stolen bike is $1700.
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The surest way to see something go to shit is to remove ownership.
That's not entirely accurate, to use a movie quote. I can assure you, to some people, ownership in no way connotes they will take care of something. One need only look at the state of some people's cars or homes. They have spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase something, only to treat it like crap.
While the overall sentiment is relatively correct, the fact is there are those people who just don't care. As I said in a previous sto
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That's not entirely accurate, to use a movie quote.
I don't know what you are referring to.
While the overall sentiment is relatively correct, the fact is there are those people who just don't care.
One person that doesn't take care of their own car, bike, cellphone, or whatever, will only cause damage to what they own. Not only does this concern me very little because it's not my money, it also contains their damage to what they bought. One person that doesn't care with access to a fleet of shared bikes can vandalize a different bike every day, as opposed to the one they own. If they toss their own bike in a lake that's one bike, and they won't toss in another
Re: Ride it like you stole it! Because you stole (Score:2)
Carbon sequestration sounds ok in principal but Iâ(TM)ve yet to hear anyone actually taking the carbon from the air or proposing a workable plan. The primary way seems to be planting a tree which only sequesters it for about 100 years at best. The best way to sequester carbon might be to bury tons of non biodegradable plastic. This definitely sequesters carbon and would be cheap and easy to do but it has 2 problems. One, we are basically already doing this every time we landfill a piece of plastic
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Carbon sequestration sounds ok in principal but I've yet to hear anyone actually taking the carbon from the air or proposing a workable plan.
I've heard workable plans for sequestering carbon.
One plan was from, if I recall correctly, a professor from Idaho State University named Darryl Siemer. I probably murdered his name but probably close enough to find his idea with your favorite search engine if you care to look into it. The idea is to mine basalt and use it for the lime content. When exposed to the air the lime reacts with CO2 to make stable carbonates, locking away the CO2.
One proposed use is as a kind of fertilizer in cropland. Plants
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I saw a YouTube lecture on the "success" of the Australia carbon tax. People saw their energy costs spike, utility outages became common place, and the economy took a hit.
No shit they removed the carbon tax, it was killing their economy, driving people into poverty, and generally making lives miserable.
If Australia was serious about reducing their CO2 emissions then they'd be building nuclear power plants. It sounds like Australia has the same kind of boneheaded politicians there as here in the USA.
Oh, wa
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The surest way to see something go to shit is to remove ownership. This is the tragedy of the commons at play when people can't be bothered to take care of a shared resource, no matter what it is. I keep hearing people misuse the tragedy of the commons to support government intervention, but the government *IS* the commons.
Yep.
It's not like this is a surprise. Public housing goes to crap, and people actually have to live there. Why anyone would think they'll take care of something they just "borrow" episodically is a mystery.
Shared bikes decay too badly. (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory shared bikes are great. I've used them in a number of cities, and really enjoyed having them around...
But the reality after some time is this - the handles and seats decay very quickly, to where after just a year or so there were not a lot of bike seats I was happy sitting in, and often handlebars left residue on my hand. So there is a lot of maintenance to be done to keep those things fresh, which I did not see many (if any) shared bike companies doing.
Scooters have a big advantage here, they have the handlebars to worry about, but since you are just standing on them there is no seat issue.
Also it's lots easier to go at a speed on a bike that might be unsafe for untrained riders. Shared scooters can be speed limited so that people can go as fast as makes sense for the area and the general abilities of riders. They are also (I think) much harder to have a problem with compared to a bike - yes the wheels can be tripped up by more things, but if they do start to go down it's much easier to step off a scooter than bail from a bike.
Currently if I had access to both shared bike and scooter, I would greatly prefer a scooter.
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The official London ones ("Boris Bikes") are regularly maintained and even on my short walk from the Tube to work I often see the council swapping them out for maintenance.
Obviously, Uber and MoBike won't be doing this as they don't give a shit and would rather compete on price, but it can be done.
I'm not convinced by scooters yet. The braking seems poor, although you're right that speeds could be limited.
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"Also it's lots easier to go at a speed on a bike that might be unsafe for untrained riders. Shared scooters can be speed limited"
Of course bikes can also be speed limited. You can even make them regenerate so that anyone trying to go over the speed limit only charges the battery. There's nothing magical about bicycles that prevents speed limiting.
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Lost? (Score:1)
Its ruff, I tell ya! (Score:1)
It s all falling apart like a Chinese Motorcycle company.
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What a concept - We'll be RICH! (Score:4, Funny)
Demand in China, (Score:3)
There is demand, believe me. I would estimate (from looking at the streets) that 30%-50% of the bike rides are done on rental bikes/ecooters/ebikes. Thats a lot of bikes, and 200000 Bikes lost per year seems a reasonable number.
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Social scores (Score:2)
Few people want to rent a bicycle (Score:2)
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A BlueBike annual subscription with unlimited rides costs $90 a year here. That's the cost of maybe 2-4 Ubers in Boston.
I've used Uber and the bikes extensively, and my preference is on the bikes because it's cheaper, I'm in control, I don't need to deal with parking or driving in a city, and I'm faster than traffic. It takes longer to get somewhere in a car than I can ride a bike. Maybe not for everyone, but after you've done it your whole life, it'd be silly not to take advantage--and it's an advantage th
This is why we can’t have nice things. (Score:1)
Mobikes are not welcome in the Netherlands (Score:2)
One of the dumbest markets to enter is one where there are already more bikes than people, and where bicycle parking is an absolute premium. People in the Netherlands absolutely detest Mobikes. On more than one occasion I've seen someone ride up to a full bike rack, get off their bike, pick up a mobike and throw it as far as possible into a canal or back alley, and then proceed to park their bike where the shared bike used to be.
It got so bad that in Amsterdam they banned companies like Mobike who don't pro
Re: Mobikes are not welcome in the Netherlands (Score:2)
It seems like the simplest solution to this problem is to require bikes to be licensed and/or locked. Then you could confiscate and/or ticket bikes that were docked in the same place for more than 12 hours. A 12 hour or overnight limit shouldnâ(TM)t affect normal people but would require the bike share companies to find solutions for the problems they are creating.
The problem is more complicated than it looks. (Score:2)
So there's hope for America (Score:2)
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I've heard they don't get much for them. I have learned to never let my bike out of sight - keep it locked up in my office when I am at work and in my back yard at home.