It was obvious to anybody on the ground in China. Shenzhen has been buried in bikes pumped by those scams for months, to the point of city mayor ordering collecting abandoned ones as garbage.
Sounds like waaay too much VC money combined with poor planning (or purposeful mismanagement). No market has limitless potential, at some point you'll saturate it in a given city.
Dallas went from having zero bikeshares to three companies in a matter of days. Anecdotally I have seen the same green and silver bikes sitting in the same places since they opened.
East Dallas has some wonderful biking (white rock lake is where lance armstrong trained) but I feel like bike shares are replacements for short uber rides, not taking bike paths for 14 miles to get into the city. I doubt the average person in the city could even make it that far.
Dallas as with most post-war cities is sprawling, with most land being either parking or roadway in the more urban areas. This makes cities built this way much less usable for any form of transit besides driving, and even there you see travel distances doubled due to the added parking at every building.
Seattle got quite lucky insofar as being not too spread out, with the ability and demand to sustain 2.25 rides per bike per day[1]. Part of this is sustained by a robust mass transit system most American cities lack where a bike for the last couple thousand feet makes all the difference for a trip, whereas without that backbone you won't see high ridership.
Often, these trips are called the missing link. Turns out, thousands of people will pay to make these trips on bike every day here, versus using another mode of transit.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694170 134 days ago [-]:
"chinese bike share companies are VC scam, they dont care what happens to the bikes, they are after the investors."
East Dallas has some wonderful biking (white rock lake is where lance armstrong trained) but I feel like bike shares are replacements for short uber rides, not taking bike paths for 14 miles to get into the city. I doubt the average person in the city could even make it that far.
Seattle got quite lucky insofar as being not too spread out, with the ability and demand to sustain 2.25 rides per bike per day[1]. Part of this is sustained by a robust mass transit system most American cities lack where a bike for the last couple thousand feet makes all the difference for a trip, whereas without that backbone you won't see high ridership.
Often, these trips are called the missing link. Turns out, thousands of people will pay to make these trips on bike every day here, versus using another mode of transit.
1 - http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2017/09/19/rolling-with-the-homi...