What a difference a year can make! When I was visiting China last year, the general drift was towards away from muscle propelled bikes towards electric, with bike manufacturers scrambling to have electrical offering. This year the muscle propelled bikes rule but in the share variety. The manufacturers scramble to be connected to one of the share companies.

The city share bikes, that you pick and leave at stations, have been picking up in China like anywhere else in the world.



However, the revolution came with commercial companies that refrain from stations. They make you find and reserve an available bike on a phone app.



The bikes are just parked randomly in the streets and even not in the streets but by highways in rural areas.





You unlock a bike by reading a QR code within the bike app



After use you park the bike anywhere you want and just lock it. The bike is then taken off your account.



The reason this took off like a fire is that you can combine the share bike use with any public transport use. You e.g. get to the bus stop by any bike you find nearby and leave it by the bus stop. At the other end, you pick a bike by the stop where you got off and ride to your final destination. People told me about using share bikes numerous times per day, every day, in a manner integrated with the rest of their life. There are problems with the bikes accumulating here and there but there is also a multitude of bike share companies trucks going around the city or even country loading and unloading the share bikes, both to move them and fix them.

The two main share companies are Mobike and Ofo but there are also smaller companies around that may differ in some details of the rental. The companies try to reduce bike maintenance and try out technologies such as solid tires and shaft drives which can impede bike efficiency. Overall, though, the customers seem to be happier with the quality of the commercial share bikes than of the city share bikes that seem to be ran to the ground over time.



The system is definitely not foreign visitor friendly. While the share apps typically have the English option, to rent you still need a Chinese phone number, WeChat Pay or AlliPay account and the latter require a Chinese bank account. Incidentally, all types of payments in China, from coffee to hotel bill, now drift towards WeChat Pay or AlliPay and QR code reading. The costs of the share rental are apparently so low that nobody cares and there is some free period. As a counterpart you hardly see anymore privately owned bikes in the streets - hence a panic among the bike manufacturers.

This isn't a revolution at all. Germans have been doing this since 2007 with mobile phone access (now an app) and no required stations. Nice to see the Chinese catch up.

DE wiki aticle

English article: English article

Sure, but Mobike + ofo operate 7.5+ million bicycles while German Railway call-a-bike operates 13 thousand (including fix) from what I find. Even if you factor the population ratio of China to Germany, there is no comparison.

That's fascinating! I assume they are single-speed? Have you gotten a chance to ride them? I'm curious how those tires feel.

I also noticed the 1-piece cranks, and that the right grip is backwards.

And that looks like a dynohub on the front? Are there integrated lights, or is that just to power the electronics needed to interface with the phone app or cell network or whatever?

For what it's worth, the bike share bikes in NYC have dynamos in the front wheel, 3-speed gear in the rear wheel, and drum brakes in both wheels. It's a practical, if heavy, setup. I imagine the dock-less bike has a battery to keep the GPS running and a dynamo to charge the battery.

My Chinese host was claiming that Mobikes already went through 3 generations and this seems to be confirmed by the internet. The Chinese versions have been single speed and without lights. However, the newest version in Singapore is supposedly 3-speed and with lights.

My host rented a Mobike for me and I rode it around the block. The solid tires worked much better than I expected. I.e. you expect some clunkiness from a share bike to start with, in that it has to withstand all kinds of abuse. If I did not know that the tires were solid, I would not notice that, I think. The bike was much more pleasant to ride than a typical city share bike I had a chance to ride in China which had pneumatic tires but was more coarsely constructed and maintained.

Both wheels have drum brakes. The GPS + lock unit behind the seatpost is said to be powered by the solar panel that occupies the bottom of the front basket.

I wonder if those solid tires can be bought anywhere, or if they're custom-made by/for Mobike.

However, the only innovation in China is the scale, not even the technology is new, and the German bikes are much better quality. Also, they just partnered with Lidl in Germany.

It was nice to be able to pay for the Chinese bike with WeChat though.

Then it's a testament to their management and software engineering skills. If it works well, we have to say bravo. NYC's share was delayed because of software imperfections, and there were imperfections for the first year or two. It works like a champ now. Some people need to work hard to make an operation look easy.

I've lived in China for the past 10 years. There are about 30 companies that have these bike apps. I even saw an eBike the other day being rented. When it first got started here, the bikes were "docked" at specific stations. Now, most of bikes can be found by GPS and left anywhere. Some apps give you some credit if you leave it at a certain location.

In the mornings, the rental companies have crews picking up bikes and relocating them to subway stations and other high-traffic areas. Some of the bikes are single-speed, others have twist-grip shifters and hub brakes. This concept has gotten so popular that other companies are sprouting up that let you rent things like umbrellas, phone chargers, etc. The payment process is an extension of paying for everything from items bought on Taobao to paying for groceries, paying at restaurants, sending money to friends, or even paying your rent (really, just about anything) using AliPay and WeChat.

it is. it's a cultural revolution IN CHINA.

Sure, time will tell. On such a large scale, it's difficult at best, and management can make or break it. But demand is high enough for there to be an incentive to make it work, even if it's not a money maker. I heard a story about the Paris bike share. One of his aides told the mayor of Paris that bikes were being stolen and sold in eastern Europe. The mayor asked how much it was costing. Upon hearing the answer, his response was, "Then add that to the budget." Sometimes a public good is good enough to be a cost sink. Money isn't the only measure of something's value.

Well acidfast7 doesn't think it's a great leap forward

During the time I was there the big story was of one of the small share companies, Wukong Bikes, folding. Apparently their mistake was in failing to mount GPS units on their bikes and thus losing too many bikes. Here is the BBC version of the story. Overall I think that the success of those companies relies on at least two factors: consistent cell network coverage in the populated areas and an increased affluence of the Chinese society. Because of the latter there is no apparently significant interest in running around and stealing saddles or wheels from those bikes or ripping the solar cells from their baskets.

During the visit I was in the North and in the South and the share bikes are ubiquitous everywhere. My own observation is that whether low or high, the extreme temperatures are easier to take when riding than when walking. During this trip I was doing many errands at one location on clumsy city share bicycles, benefiting from a public transport card that one host lent me. I was more bothered by the lack of maintenance on those bikes, rusted chains, stuck seatposts, bent pedals, than the 99F/37C temperatures I had to ride in. I was longing for the slicker Mobikes standing everywhere.

That's an interesting alternative take on the mostly bad news I've been seeing on Facebook about bike sharing in China, which has been described as a chaotic mess. I suspected that I was seeing the results of Facebook's filter bubble, which tends to reinforce our existing biases. One of my friends is involved in the local bike share program and the U.S. media reports on bike sharing are biased by the companies that have a vested interest in controlling monopolies. So I had a hunch the "problem" in China was being exaggerated to dissuade U.S. cities from allowing any competition.

That's interesting, because my takeaway from the OP was that the original centralized bikeshare program sucks, and smaller bikeshare programs run by private (?) companies are doing a much better job

Facebook and China are not pals.

To clarify, I appreciate the city sponsored or contracted share programs too. What the specific commercial companies brought to the table is the freeing of bikes from the share stations, equipping them with GPS for easier integration with phone apps and also broad maintenance and apparently efforts to evolve the design to suit market needs.

What I see as problems with the city sponsored programs in China is that each city seems to have adopted their own program with a limited maintenance foresight. The bikes are fine when they are new but quickly fall into disrepair. The repairs that are done are not commensurate with the problems that develop. E.g. in the city where I frequently rode a city bike, the bikes had integrated cable locks with keys in case you wanted to park the bike temporarily. The locks rusted and keys got stuck and broken. A customer with a broken or lost key might resort to cutting the cable in order to get the bike off the account. The cable would never get fixed and after a while nearly all share bikes would have their cable locks cut and keys missing or broken etc.

The above is not a must for a city contracted program. In Europe I encountered city contracted Veturilo/nextbike share programs, there with stations, well beyond any teething problems and seemingly embraced by the communities. The bikes are reasonably maintained, have lights powered by dynohubs and are equipped with 3 gears. I do not like the single brake, but this could be in the specific market. The same app/account apparently works for you in different cities. Looking on the web, I see that they have flex bikes too, but not where I have been. For sure a company working in different markets, transferring solutions from one to another, trying things out in a basket etc., will be doing much better than any isolated city program. It could be that cities jump onto the latter because they think they can run one just like their bus system, then to find out that it is not the same.

Very cool!