It’s not about the bike: The real story of oBike and what it can teach us

https://cyclingtips.com/2018/08/lessons-learned-from-the-real-story-of-obike-or-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/

by unicornporn • 8 years ago

55 25 8 years ago

_nalply• 8 years ago

Where I live there's Velospot (velospot.ch), and it works rather well. The differences: using a RFID card, not dockless, an organisation in the city itself and cooperation with the local jobless employment institution, a yearly fee and usage fees for usages above one hour.

However, in a neighbouring city a competing bike sharing company also failed. They misdesigned the locks and after a security hole went public all their bikes got stolen.

It seems that bike sharing is really difficult!

leoedin• 8 years ago

I hope we can find a sustainable model with these bikes. They are really useful in the cities they're in. I've used them in the UK in London and Bristol, and it really feels rather magical when you stumble across a bike, realise it's by far the fastest way to get where you're going, and within minutes you're riding off.

Perhaps the solution is a hybrid of the fixed dock cycle schemes which are really capital intensive to install, and these completely free-floating schemes. Maybe some docks with only RFID chips and no active electronics. Make the docks steel frames which are just bolted to the ground rather than cast in concrete, and maybe installation is affordable.

ar0• 8 years ago

There exist quite a few attempts at this and most work pretty well in my experience:

- Publibike in Switzerland (publibike.ch) operates your idea of cheaper docks: they are just a metal sign next to parking space with some (bluetooth-like) electronics in them to communicate with the bikes. You can only return your bike at one of these parking spaces. At the same time, they avoid the cost of installing fixed docks for each bike. They had some problems with their locks on the bikes not working properly, but these seem to be resolved and otherwise they work really well IMO.

- INDIGO weel (https://www.indigoweel.com/) is a free-floating system, but not totally free floating: you can only return your bike in GPS-fenced "allowed areas", which should be bike parking spots, avoiding the chaos of completely free-floating bikes. As GPS fences are quite broad, this doesn't work perfectly but it helps. Some of the schemes operated by Nextbike in Germany also work like that (they also operate with fixed docks in some cities, though).

I prefer these dock- or semi-dock-based systems to the totally free-floating ones, as if you know where the docks are its much easier and more reliable to actually find a bike there. Especially if you are travelling in a group, it will be a challenge to "collect" enough bikes with a free-floating system (unless you have so many bikes standing around on the streets that they become a public nuisance).

Nevertheless, I do not think judging free-floating systems by oBike is a good idea: oBike was uniquely bad in many respects (the quality of the bikes, the lack of local staff and support, the lack of GPS on the bikes, the need for a deposit etc.) and other free-floating schemes such as Limebike seem to work quite well.

stevekemp2• 8 years ago

The docks, here in Helsinki, are integrated well with the bus & tram API/app. That means you can see how many bikes are sat at each dock-point around the city, in real-time, which is pretty good.

improbable22• 8 years ago

Krakow has a hybrid system like this which seems to work well. The docks are just dumb metal, and the bike has u-lock with which you can equally well lock it to a street sign.

Locking a bike anywhere away from a dock costs you a little extra, and there is a bounty for rescuing such bikes... but most of them live at the docks, so you know where to go to get one. If the dock is full you can lock it anywhere nearby too.

Edit: https://en.wavelo.pl/

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 years ago

The main problem with bike sharing schemes is that there are too many competitors, none of which has enough bikes to actually be useful. Few people are willing to sign up with five different companies and deal with five different ways to unlock the bikes.

If they somehow found a way to work together, grant mutual access to the networks, then it might work. Otherwise, you'll need a massive investment into bikes to get critical mass, and cities often increase that problem by only allowing each company to deploy a few hundred bikes.

Also, as the article points out, those locks... I've yet to see an electronic lock that would actually work reliably, and for the bike sharing scheme I use, I feel like the ride works well (e-bike present, unlocks on first attempt, battery is charged) about 50% of the time, ignoring a stretch of my commute (to/from the public transit stop) where I know there will be no bikes available at the time I'll be going.

vertex-four2• 8 years ago

The actual solution here is for municipal transport companies to get involved - e.g. there’s a brand new bike scheme in Edinburgh that was set up by the council-owned bus company and run by Serco under a concession. The bikes are really quite nice - there’s docks all over the city centre and clearly marked spots where you can use the integrated lock to leave them where a dock can’t be installed, they’re quite sturdy and easy to use, and handle the hills quite well. There’s rumours that electric assist bikes are being brought in too. I handed in my bus pass and bought a bike pass (for a savings of a few hundred pounds) within the first week.

mianos• 8 years ago

One rather long creative wiring essay on why it's actually O-Bike's fault delinquents dumped their bikes in the creek? Conspiracy theories? Shady tactics about collecting data by lending bikes without GPSs? This one has everything but sense.

vorg• 8 years ago

The whole point of these bikeshare services is that each bike has a GPS and the central system can livefeed the guaranteed location of nearby available bikes to a user's phone. If O-bike didn't have GPS, then it wasn't a real bikeshare service.

I wouldn't trust Mobike to be more about the bike than O-bike was, though. A few months after joining Mobike in China earlier this year, they decreased the default scale on the location map in their app when you first open it. Within a few months, the usual number of nearby bikes had noticeably decreased, but this was obscured in the app map because of the smaller scaling. It seems like they changed the app map scaling because they were planning the decrease in bikes in the local area. Perhaps they had collected enough deposits in this district, and moved the bikes in bulk to another district of the city with fewer signups to make it look like bikes were always available there, thus encouraging people there to pay deposits.

RufusJacksons• 8 years ago

It was a weird few months seeing the bikes everywhere, but only ever seeing them ridden by groups of young kids. I asked a group of Sudanese boys how they liked them, and they showed me how they jimmyed the locks and then rode them for a while until ditching them. Poorly planned system from a hardware perspective - the venture capital idea makes sense to me

danpalmer• 8 years ago

I tried oBike in London last year because it seemed like it would be more convenient than the "Boris Bikes" that the government provide (TfL to be precise).

I used one once and it was probably the worst bike I've ever ridden, it was like cycling through treacle. I thought it might have been just that bike so tried once more and it was the same on a different bike.

The route I take home takes me 17 minutes on a Boris Bike (which are built like a tank and not at all a fast bike to ride), and I typically finish feeling like I've exercised but not feeling out of breath for more than a few seconds. The oBike took 25 minutes and I came off feeling like I'd had a very tough workout. They are just not good enough quality.

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

Obike failed because of bad execution. Bikes were malfucntioning, hard to find, and they upset the locals. A few of their competitors seem to be doing better. I've tried out a few in Berlin before settling on Mobike. Obike has all but disappeared here. But Mobike seems to be pretty popular and is very similar conceptually.

Part of the attraction is flat fee subscriptions. You can either pay like a euro for half an hour, or just get a flat fee subscription and grab a bike whenever you need one. I'm currently on a 20 euro for 3 months plan with mobike; which is really good value. I grab one a few times per week. Multiple times on some days. I'm saving a ton of money on public transport. And I get a bit of good exercise (these bikes are hard work).

Financially, this makes a lot of sense. They are getting reliable revenue from me and probably a couple of thousand users plus some less frequent revenue from maybe 10-20k users. To keep the money flowing, all they need to do is make sure that they have enough bikes distributed around the city.

These bikes are not that expensive. Probably they cost around 100-150 each. Maybe less. Very sturdy, not a lot of parts that can break, etc. So, Mobike did the obvious thing: flood the city with bikes. From what I understand they have at least around 5000 bikes on the streets here and are planning to deploy even more. Whatever it is, the end result is that I can find a mobike whenever I need one with relatively little effort.

At 100 euro per bike, we are talking half a million of investment for 5k bikes. With thousands or tens of thousands of users, this becomes meaningful revenue pretty quickly. In my case, if I keep on paying their flatfee, I'll end up paying around 80 per year. Only a few thousand people like me means they earn back their investment in a year. I imagine there's other cost as well but probably the per bike expenses are pretty modest. Ballpark, they should be making money.

From what I can see most of their competitors are trying to compete with far less bikes and failing. The trick is having enough bikes on the street to keep users hooked and doing that in as many big cities as possible. That's more or less what Mobike and their VC funded competitors are doing.

jaclaz2• 8 years ago

The article is very nice, but I have to disagree with the "absolving the citizens/users" part.

It is not like these bikes self-dump themselves in rivers, not Obikes in Melbourne, nor Mobikes in Manchester [0] or in any other place.

That the Obike is (was) a sort of get money quick scheme or not and that the bikes were not particularly comfortable/easy to use is not a valid reason for the amount of vandalism reported.

Surely it is nothing "uniquely naughty" about the Australians, but it is something "universally naughty" that shouldn't be IMHO dismissed so easily or simply considered a "new normal" of some kind.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...

patall2• 8 years ago

I agree that there is a vandalism problem with such a service but that has also a lot to do with the users. I first noticed these bikes not because of their bright colors or because I heard about them but because they repeatedly blocked my pedestrian walkway. We have a lot of bikes around here but none of them are parked like these bikes that the last customer just wanted to get rid of and I more than once got the feeling that I should just throw that bike down into the water to get rid of the obstacle (and what kept me from doing that was only that than the city would still have to get rid of it). However, I have never had any problems with any of the bike-sharing services that offer fixed stations were you get and return your bike and I think a lot of people do so. So in my perspective, it has nothing to do with "universal naughtiness", just that some of these companies are ass-hole, law ignoring ponzi schemes.

scarejunba• 8 years ago

The part that gets me about the sentiment expressed in posts like this are that there are loads of people who will angrily just do things that make my life worse. They think they're stopping the asshole law-ignoring company but in truth they're just law-ignoring assholes themselves.

So they perceive some war between them and some company and impose that cost upon me - an innocent third party. I don't care if there's a scooter or bike by the side of the road because it isn't even an inconvenience, but when you're throwing it onto the street or into a water body, you're not a hero. To me, you're a worse villain than the company.

Now you have the restraint to not do this but there is a véritable plethora of morons who do not.

jaclaz2• 8 years ago

and I more than once got the feeling that I should just throw that bike down into the water to get rid of the obstacle (and what kept me from doing that was only that than the city would still have to get rid of it).

Sure, that feeling is perfectly normal, but you didn't throw the bike into the river, after all.

robotmay• 8 years ago

We have nextbike in Cardiff and they've been a huge hit. There's static points to return them to, which most people seem to do, and the pricing is very sensible. There's no security deposit like with oBike, and they've rigged up some deals with the local council and universities to get more people using them. The quality of the bikes is alright, and I just carry a keyring with a few utility allen-keys on it in case anything needs tightening (though they are prompt at fixing broken bikes, it's handy to be able to tighten something up if you're in a rush).

https://www.nextbike.co.uk/en/news/another-27-nextbike-locat...

Now if only our council would design cycle lanes that weren't massively fucking stupid, we'd be golden.

Sidenote: I was sat in a bar having locked one of the nextbikes up outside (lock through the wheel, on its stand), and got a very entertaining 5 minutes watching a woman and her partner try to steal it. They didn't seem to understand that it was locked. They're also fecking heavy, so I'm not sure how far they'd have gotten with it if they had the brainpower to move it in the first place.

CydeWeys• 8 years ago

I don't disagree with the overall thrust of the article, but the author doesn't know what venture capital is:

"Assuming oBike were gunning for a deposit from a user base one-tenth the population of Sydney and Melbourne – that’s still just under one million users. If each of them paid $69.99, you just amassed nearly $70 million in venture capital, from an operation where your fleet cost perhaps $120,000, at most."

Money your users pay you is revenue, not venture capital. This mistake repeats several times throughout the article. The author seems to think that the point of a startup is to get "venture capital" in the form of revenue from customers, when it really exists to get venture capital in the form of investments from VCs.

antpls• 8 years ago

I think the author is aware of the difference. His claim is specifically that the whole enterprise wasn't made to provide a bike-sharing service, it was made, or evolved, to use the user's deposits as a fund for something else (on the users behalf).

frabbit• 8 years ago

Bike sharing schemes were widely predicted to fail in Australia due to their compulsory helmet laws for cyclists. The argument was that few people would want to put on a shared helmet, and that preparation involved in having to bring a helmet would deter casual use -- which is the whole point of such schemes.

It’s not about the bike: The real story of oBike and what it can teach us

Related Stories