A phone app to rent out spare rooms in your house or to allow anyone to work as a taxi driver. Madness! That was the attitude in some quarters to the introduction of AirBNB and Uber. So caution is needed before leaping to judgement on the problems faced by app-based bicycle sharing schemes.
Four companies started filling Sydney's inner city streets with their colourful bikes last year but this week one of them, Ofo, announced it was winding down its Australian operations and Reddy Go, an Australian-owned provider, is restructuring and selling off its fleet. Singapore-based Obike has already announced it is pulling out of Melbourne.
Over the past year these companies placed on Sydney footpaths and nature strips thousands of bikes which can be booked and then unlocked via a mobile phone app in return for an hourly fee per ride. At the end of the ride the app locks the bike.
Dockless bikes parked on an inner-city street.
Photo: Peter Braig
The bikes, that have proliferated in hundreds of cities overseas, offer convenience and health benefits for users. They complement public transport by offering an easy way to go the last mile from train station or bus stop to ultimate destination. In the first two months of this year 390,000 trips were made on the bikes that might otherwise have been taken by car on Sydney's congested streets.
If dockless bikes are retreating in Australia it is firstly because the promoters over-estimated demand for the service in Australia. Thinning out the market makes commercial sense and is not a bad thing.
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Yet the withdrawal of so many providers raises questions about the environment for bike sharing and bicycles generally in NSW. The main stumbling block has been the pollution from seemingly hundreds of bicycles that have been dumped into the harbour or stuck up trees or simply abandoned, obstructing footpaths and door steps.
Many councils in NSW are pushing to follow Melbourne which imposed penalties of up to $3000 that drove Obike out of the city. Those fines are punitively high since motorists only pay $263 for stopping on a clearway and since the primary blame lies with the vandals.
NSW should first consider alternatives which will not kill the whole business model. Since unusued bikes sitting in the same place are more likely to attract bored kids, the reduction in the number of providers should help relieve the vandalism problem. Equally firms will have to be encouraged to invest more in collecting stranded bikes. Most apps already allow users to report broken or dumped bikes and they can do more. One ingenious solution: the fourth player in the Australian market, Mobike, recently started offering cash rewards in China for users if they rode bikes parked in low demand areas and drove them back to the town centre.
The best way to build public acceptance of the bikes is for more people use them. But here regulations are a major problem. Australian laws which mandate the use of helmets are a deterrent since they are usually the first thing vandals take from a dockless bike. Users will likely have to carry their own. More generally the lack of bicycle paths and NSW's exorbitant fines for trivial cycling offences are a major deterrent. The opposition to the dockless bikes also owes much to the culture of venomous hostility to all bicycle riders from motorists on Sydney's streets. That also will gradually have to change.
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