China Is Still Sorting Through Its Colorful Bike-Share Graveyards

Atlantic ^ | Aug 1, 2018 | Alan Taylor

[Zhang Fei]

Back in March, I posted “The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles,” showing just some of the millions of bicycles that had been rapidly built and dumped into Chinese cities by bike-share companies looking to get in on the next big thing, only to crash hard. In the months since, more of those bike-share startups have gone bankrupt or consolidated, and the bicycle graveyards remain. Municipal governments are still wrangling with the fallout, confiscating derelict or illegally parked bikes, crafting new laws, and working out what to do with millions of abandoned bicycles. In a few cases, plans have been announced to refurbish and distribute some of the bikes to smaller neighboring towns, in others, wholesale recycling has begun, and bicycles are being crushed into cubes. The scale of the situation was so large to begin with, it will be a long time before the bicycle graveyards fade away.

[Carriage Hill]

I was looking at russia, not china; my error.

# COUNTRY SIZE AMOUNT
1 Russia 6.6 million square miles
=2 Canada 3.8 million square miles
=2 United States 3.8 million square miles
4 China 3.7 million square miles

[rktman]

Hey, they started one here in Reno. They’re finding them in the river, in the middle of NFW. I wonder how many will end up on the Playa for Burning Man coming up the end of the month. Progressive. Another great idear! Stunning pictures of the waste.

[elbook]

a cheap “jungle gyms for children” program for the next 5-year plan

[hanamizu]

Send them to Africa. With crummy roads (where there any roads at all), villagers and dwellers in outlying areas have no workable transportation except Barefoot Express.

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And bikes are a useful low-tech way of hauling freight. The user doesn’t ride the bike, he walks it.