Shared-Bike Graveyards Continue to Frustrate Shanghai Residents

This article originally appeared on our sister website, Urban Family Shanghai.

By Yuzhou Hu

Following the downfall of Bluegogo, the third-largest bike-sharing company in China, it seems that the war on shared bikes has come to an end for the time being. Nonetheless, massive bike graveyards and piles of abandoned bikes remain an unresolved issue in Shanghai.

Take a look at one of the graveyards on Haining Lu where bikes of mixed brands are piled haphazardly like a scene from Transformers. According to the Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission, there are approximately 10,0000 damaged and unused bikes at this site alone.

Due to high housing prices on this road, netizens are even whining about the occupation of space. “This is awkward. The bike graveyards are much more expensive than that of humans,” one netizen comments on Netease.

The Shanghai’s traffic authority has recognized the problem and is working with bike-sharing companies to develop solutions, but the challenges they face are extensive. After all, the act of recycling these wasted bikes requires considerable human resources and costs a lot of money. In addition, a significant number of the companies who own the bikes have already collapsed, reports Shine.

Take Xiaoming Bikes as an example. The corporation announced bankruptcy a couple of days ago. As Kankanews reports, to date, the company owes more than RMB140 million in deposits to its users. Dispatching work crews to collect the dumped bikes is definitely out of the question due to the cost of managing such a significant undertaking.

The phenomenon of bike graveyards is not exclusive to Shanghai. According to Netease, there are currently millions of deserted bikes across the country. Shanghai is not the only city that needs to implement strategies to solve this problem.

[Images via Netease, Kankanews and Shine]

This article was originally published by our sister magazine Urban Family Shanghai. For more articles like this, visit the Urban Family website, or follow the Urban Family WeChat account (ID: urbanfamilyshanghai).