Bicycle graveyards
 

Read through the article. Sad.

https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doc...ards-1.6325287

Crazy. The Chinese bike version of the GFC bailouts.

They weren't really hidden. At one point they were out in the open. I remember years ago seeing the piles of those awful OFO bikes on public paths just 1000s stacked up in a long row. When people create junk it doesn't go away it gets piled up. It would be cool to see something done with that junk but I don't want to see it dumped back on the street.

The irony is that some day, after all of those bikes are destroyed, the surviving examples will become collectibles.

We have crushed millions of automobiles, many of them not very good in the first place, and today people pay enormous amounts to re-acquire surviving relics from the past.

John

tl,dr Why isn't there a used market for all of those bike share bikes or the parts? What am I missing? Are all the parts proprietary to that design and can't be used on "standard" bikes in order to keep the theft of those bikes down? Maybe it has 720c tires, tubes, and wheels, and 33mm seatposts, etc...?

The frames really are single purpose with weird security stuff built in and, obviously, nobody likes riding them much or this wouldn't have happened. Even in China, those parts are going to have to be worth a fair amount to justify the labor costs of breaking the bikes down.

By the title I was figuring you were talking about those police station impounds...

I remember the same thing here in the US. We had tons of bike share bikes here in DFW. Ofo, Lime Bike and a few others. These were left everywhere. People even threw them in rivers, lakes... It got so bad that they all got banned and pulled out. I was hoping to find a few cheap ones but that was not possible either. I think they all got scrapped.
Its a pity since these bikes could have also been given to people who could have used them. Yes they were not the very best quality but probably better than any cheap big box store bike.
But now I am seeing the same with these electric scooters. Discarded and left everywhere with toxic batteries embedded.

tragic that's really sad !

I went down a Youtube rabbit hole once and watched a series of videos from a Chinese scrapper. They were grinding the bikes into potato chip size chunks. They would just toss the bike in complete (tires, seat, lights etc.-everything) and this impressive grinder would do it's thing. I suppose the "chips" become landfill as there was no consideration taken to isolate the different materials used to construct a bike.

Hey…I think I see my old Schwinn.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...5d6d6f902.jpeg

Its interesting that articles continue to be written about this. The issue has been well documented over the last handful of years.
But i suppose it is an issue that hasnt gone away, so its of value to 'report' on it every now and again for those that didnt know.

Its a really sad thing to see- such environmental waste.

Beijing used to be known as the "City of Bicycles". Now, it's the City of Smog. Between Beijing and Shanghai, about 50,000 die annually due to air pollution. Industry, a growing middle class and the insatiable Chinese taste for consumption all contribute. The bicycles of Beijing are gone, replaced by cars.

Locally, immigrants arrive in Canada, can't speak english enough to read the road signs yet the first thing they do is get a drivers license. Then, the next stop is the Porsche, BMW or Benz dealerships. One has to get to the Gucci and Chanel stores in style, of course. There is NO WAY these people are going to be riding a bicycle at -25c here, or even at 25 above, as a means of transportation or to assist the environment. Bicycles are for peasants.

Harsh, I know. But true.

So the Photographer appears to say that these discarded bicycles are due to contract suppliers competing against each other to provide rent bicycles and these junked bikes are of the suppliers that failed?

Is he saying that uncontrolled Capitalism in a Communist country caused these junk yards?

I think there is more to this story and its not just about bicycles.

I’m going to try to stay out of the politics of it, but the long and short of the Chinese bike bubble was that investors were pumping so much cash into these startup bikeshare companies, that there were too many players for all but the few largest to survive. They kept cutting the pie into more and more pieces , and all but the biggest players couldn’t get enough market share to sustain, so a company would fold ( sometimes after only a few weeks) and abandon it’s fleet, then another company would roll out it’s service, and the cycle would repeat.

One of the issues China had was Dockless vs Dock type bike shares.

The dockless bike shares ended up being essentially dumped whenever a person was done with the bike. And, ended up becoming a giant social problem.

Also keep in mind that China has a population of 1.4 billion.

So, while a small city here may have a few dozen bikeshare bikes, they would have had them by the thousands in some Chinese cities.

I could imagine difficulties with erratic growth of multiple companies in the same urban area.

There should be rebuilding of bikes, recycling, etc. But, that depends on building the service infrastructure with the company. Is it cheaper to buy new?

What a waste of resources and now pollution, visual and physical. So many people in 3rd world countries could use those bikes for basic transportation. What a travesty.

Most parts on them are prepietary, and can't be used on regular bikes, or just easilly swapped.

The same thing happen here. Whoever, would take the bike and dump it wherever they landed. The bike company had to run down all the missing bikes, everyday. Needless to say, there no bike to rent here any more.
Watch some of the bike path video from a guy called "Biker 21ST" on you tube in Calf. Same thing with dead electric bikes dropped along the paths.

Disgusting waste

That's a Chinese government "news" source, and the OP video shows just how much that 2019 story was an official whitewash of how big the problem is.