September 26, 2017

Dockless bike share

A big game changer happened in the bike share community in China in 2016: dock-less bike share (DBS) programs represented by Mobike and Ofo began to quickly gain popularity since  first appearing in Shanghai’s urban transportation system in April 2016. Unlike traditional bike-sharing systems such as Citi Bike in New York City and Divvy in Chicago, DBS allows the customers to lock the bikes anywhere instead of at a docking station. Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, using a GPS installed on each bike, the users can simply reserve a bike nearby, find the bike and unlock it through apps, which greatly increases the convenience. Besides its convenience and low cost, DBS has also gained popularity in China because of the high biking demand in big metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai. Since bikes are not allowed to be taken into subway cars and buses, shared bikes have proved to be very popular at transit stations for the last kilometer of a trip. In 2016, more than 30 DBS companies entered the Chinese market in a six month period. The growth and investment attraction of dock-less bike share is unprecedented in China.  Since its market debut in April 2016, the popular bike share company Mobike has spread to dozens of Chinese cities. By December 2016 the number of Mobike bicycles in each of the major metropolitan areas of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou exceeded 100,000. The fundraising of Mobike in 2017 alone was already nearly US $1 billion by July 2017, which presages the further expansion of their service. Recently, DBS systems are also emerging in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia in cities such as Singapore, Dublin, London and Seattle.

One side-effect of the fast growth of the DBS services, however, is that there has been little opportunity for reflection on its impact on and its position in urban transportation systems. Out of curiosity, my sister and I started an online questionnaire survey in Chinese cities where DBS services are available to find out the basic characteristics of DBS trips, the modes that DBS replaces and the user preferences. We recruited 812 respondents by snowball sampling through several popular Chinese online platforms including WeChat, QQ and micro-blog.

According to our sample, DBS trips are generally short (93% within half an hour) and predominantly treated as a way to solve the first/last mile of transit trips. 52% of the users mainly choose DBS for commuting trips and 46% mainly use it for non-commuting trips. For commuting trips, even though DBS can greatly improve the convenience of transit, it fails to attract car drivers to shift to public transportation (Figure 1).  This means currently DBS does not contribute significantly to automobile dependency reduction and traffic congestion relief as claimed by some service providers. For non-commuting trips, DBS replaces a significant amount of motorized trips by bus, taxi, and driving. This different effect of DBS on commuting and non-commuting trips could be due to the inherent characteristic of this service: the uncertain availability of bikes. For non-commuting trips such as leisure and shopping, the travelers usually face less time pressure than commuting trips.

Figure 1: Modes replaced by DBS for commute trips

When asked the maximum time they would accept to find a DBS bike, 64% respondents chose within 5 min and 92% chosen within 10 min. So the DBS users have a low tolerance when it comes to the time and distance to find a DBS bike, which shows the success of a DBS program highly relies on the ubiquity of bikes, especially during peak hours. Currently, most users believe there is a lack of bike supply for the DBS programs in Chinese cities (Figure 2), which contradicts with the popular observations on the media: bikes piled up in public areas such as parks and sidewalks (Figure 3). The signs of both shortage and overflow of DBS bikes indicates the imbalance of supply and demand in certain times and locations.

FIGURE 2 Barriers to more usage of DBS

FIGURE 3 Bike overflow along sidewalk

When a city considers incorporating DBS in its transportation system, it is important to tailor the service to the city itself.

• Dock or dock-less? Tailor the service to the city.

Even though dock-less bike share offers more flexibility of parking, station-based bike share services at the right locations might offer more stability because the distance and time to find bike is relatively more certain. The certainty of travel time is especially important for commuting trips. For cities that want to target commuting trips with their bike share, the two service types should be carefully compared. Sometimes the hybridization of the two might be more effective. For example, in Portland Oregon, the bike share BIKETOWN is a station-based bike share with a twist: it allows the users to park the bikes on public biking areas instead of the stations and offers credits for those who bring the bikes to the stations.

• Avoid cut-throat competition among the companies

When all DBS companies are competing for market share by providing more bikes than others, this could really put the city into a conundrum: parking becomes hard in certain areas such as around a park or a subway station, so the users will have no choice but to park the bikes illegally. The cities should consider the side-effects of bringing in too many bikes and maybe take control over the scale of the companies.

• Helmet law

To ensure the safety of biking in the cities, some U.S. cities require bikers to wear helmets. In these cities, the companies could consider providing helmets that can be locked to the bikes.

• Stronger regulations

The DBS services in Chinese cities currently provide channels for the users to report appropriation, vandalism, and illegal parking, but our survey shows that almost 50% of the users seldom report these behaviors. For cities and companies that are considering trying out this new service, stronger regulations might need to be considered.