Nanjing received a considerable amount of rain this past weekend,
which is normal for this time of year and nothing to get too worried about.
According to the
Wednesday edition of Nanjing Daily though, the city is getting swamped.
Swamped, that is, by shared bikes.
Calling the bike-sharing phenomenon a “tidal wave” [潮汐式],
the local Communist Party newspaper states that since the beginning of the
calendar year, possibly 200,000 shared bicycles have hit the streets of
Nanjing. “Sharing bicycles has become an important part of the city's green
travel,” the article concedes. And while other cities in China have seen
criticisms that bike-sharing blocks sidewalks, hinders pedestrian traffic, and conveys
a sense of disorder, Nanjing officials seemed to have kept the problem largely
under control.
But here the local government goes again--asking, as the
article notes, “How many bicycles can Nanjing accommodate? Are shared bicycles
already in oversupply?”
The problem isn’t the bikes but the patterns of their usage—indeed,
the reference to “tides” is as much about morning and evening surges in
shared-bike usage in Nanjing as it is to a flood of
share-bikes generally.
It’s a confluence of two problems.
For some, there still aren’t enough bikes to share: More
need to be made available where they’re more likely to be used.
For example, according to the article, “Mr. Sun of Guanghua
Road [光华路] who wants to
cycle to work finds that every morning at 8:30 it’s difficult to find a bike,
and downstairs from his workplace after an afternoon that was full of them, after
6 o'clock, bikes disappeared downstairs without a trace.”
But for many others, the challenge is not getting
shared-bikes, but being able to get by them. The plethora of bicycles at some
spots impeding traffic of all types (pedestrian, car, and bicycle) has led some
in Nanjing to characterize the shared-bike situation as creating “a city under
siege” [围城]—strong terms, to be sure.
The deluge has become disabling for some. Shared-bike
companies have been made responsible for relocating bikes from heavily
trafficked streets and sidewalks, but usually it’s been the parking attendants
and city workers at subway
stations and tourist sites that end up doing the repositioning and
rearranging, sometimes late at night, the piece notes. Already April has seen
record number of users especially during the Qingming [清明] holiday and on the weekends, the article
notes, with too many bikes, much of the time with too many at the wrong
locations.
No one seems quite sure how to best deal with these
unintended consequences of what’s being characterized as a tidal event worth
talking about—both the technical issue of how to calculate ridership and the
surge of share-bikes generally. Indeed, Wednesday’s article is slated to be the
first in a series about the challenges that bike-sharing continues to pose to
Nanjing, in the hope that contributions to solving the problem can be solicited.
That’s a common problem in Chinese society: Everyone wants
to complain, few wish to actually participate in finding a solution, especially
one that involves self-sacrifice. Public policy in local China rarely ever
involves the actual public. Officials here are quick to say that one good
reason for the latter is because of the former.
Nonetheless, Nanjing has a problem--one that
government officials maintain is not necessarily theirs alone to address.
Unsurprisingly, the article reflects that line, insisting “the effective
planning and standardized management of the sharing of bicycles is the primary
problem that management and cycling companies need to solve.”
That is, it’s the share-bike firms that need to confront and
fix this issue—or at least propose some way to deal with the tide.
Until then, Nanjing government and its residents may have to be satisfied with
just treading water.
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