China's bike-sharing heavyweight Ofo has expanded again with a plan to stop vandalism
It's a cheap, sustainable and fitness-building means of public transport — what could go wrong?
Dockless bike-sharing has come under fire of late, thanks to unrelenting jerks users dumping the bikes in random places, vandalising and stripping the bikes for parts.
Now, one of China's most aggressive bike-sharing companies, Ofo, has launched in the Australian market, picking Adelaide for its debut in the southern hemisphere — and Ofo reckons it's got these pesky dumping problems all sorted.
Ofo joins other competitors already in Australia, including local firm ReddyGo, and Singapore-founded oBike, both of which launched some months ago.
Being in Australia is part of Ofo's plans to operate in 20 countries by the end of 2017. Now valued at over $1 billion in funding, Ofo's already got a casual 10 million bikes (yep, that's 10 million) in over 180 cities across 13 countries, so this is, really, just one more notch in the bedpost for the company.
But if recent, problematic trends in the dockless bike-sharing industry continue, Ofo needs to have a solid plan to combat bike dumping and vandalism.
Australia, the U.S., the UK and Singapore saw a significant amount of bike-share dumping earlier this year — not to mention this towering pile of ditched bikes in Shenzhen, China. Ofo and fellow dockless companies have been finding their bikes abandoned in drains, stripped of parts, and even painted to obscure company branding.
oBike fished 42 bikes from Melbourne's Yarra River on one day alone.
But Ofo says they've got this under control.
“We are determined to be the first bike share platform to launch in Australia the 'right way,' with sufficient local resourcing from day one to ensure that all bikes are maintained, re-distributed appropriately, have a helmet and are parked properly,” said Ofo Australia's head of strategy, Scott Walker.
Ofo told Mashable back in March that the solution was more bikes, so people didn't feel the need to hog them as a common commodity.
The first batch of 50 bikes will land in both Adelaide's city centre and North Adelaide. Ofo will identify "preferred parking zones" on the app. Users can also report a missing helmet or faulty bike in the app. Plus, Ofo is working on a credit system to reward users who use the bikes correctly and deducts points from rule-breakers — a strategy already employed by fellow Chinese bike-share company Mobike.
Could work?
Shannon Connellan is Mashable's UK Editor based in London, formerly Mashable's Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives in the Creel House. A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror.
