Bike Sharing Leaves Shanghai Drowning in Bikes

Shanghai is suffering from too much of a good thing, it seems. Andy Boreham writes in Shanghai Daily that the city is currently experiencing bikesharing mayhem, with bikes from multiple competing bikeshare companies left parked on the streets in various states of disrepair. Bik share users have also been parking their rides randomly around metro stations, making it sometimes "impossible to find a gap through which to enter the station..."

The problem has come in the form of clogged streets, littered with lines and lines and lines of haphazardly placed rental bikes — some operational, some not — in every color of the rainbow. It’s not pretty, and it’s not functional.

Most of these bikes move like a tidal wave on a daily basis, where they go from drenching suburban streets in the evening after work, to literally flooding Metro stations in the morning where they are left for the entire day.

Boreham notes that the number of bikeshares on the street is expected to climb to 500,000 this year, forcing the Shanghai government to begin tackling the issue of better enforcement and regulation. Among other new regulations will be a requirement that bikeshare companies remove broken or abandoned bikes from the street within 48 hours.