Name: China's Bike-Sharing Disaster
Uploaded: 2021-05-26T14:43:05.000Z
Duration: 7 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

this is China's incredible bike-share bubble.

So whether you're out for some fresh air and exercise

or grabbing some fast food at “WickDonald's”,

Unfortunately, thanks to a bubble in dock-free bike-sharing,

So on today's episode of China Uncensored,

let's look at how China's bike-sharing program

One giant difference between China's bike-sharing

and what you're used to in the US is docking.

For bike-sharing in, say, San Francisco…

And you can unlock a bike with a physical key,

The benefits are that it's easy for the city governments

It's easy for the bike-share companies to track them,

and use vans to move bikes around to where they're needed most.

and if there's no dock within about a mile

of where a person wants to start or end their trip,

they're simply not going to use the bike-share.

But in China, cities have a cure for this last mile problem:

you can just unlock one using your mobile app.

And when you're done, leave it wherever you want!

Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease.

Where, as you can see, people ride shared bikes

right up to the entrance, and then just throw them

on top of the ginormous pile of other bikes

before going inside to enjoy the scenery.

thanks to the brilliant combination of cutthroat competition

There's now about 500 or so competing dockless

…with the idea being that if their bike is on top of the pile,

people will choose their brand over their competitors'.

With no limits to the number of companies

Two of the biggest bike-sharing startups in China are Ofo

Between them they've got more than 120 million registered users

and more than 13 million bikes piling up in Chinese cities.

is billions of dollars in venture capital.

Ofo, with its trademark canary yellow bikes…

…has raised at least 1.3 billion dollars in investment

recently got 600 million in its latest funding round,

bringing its market cap to about $1 billion dollars.

And these companies with 10-figure market valuations

are locked in a cash-burning race to dominate market share

by pumping out bikes as fast as possible,

and stacking them in the streets as high as possible.

To deal with this, some cities have starting sending

This cyclist has to ride in the street with cars,

because the bike lane has turned into a bike pile.

Fortunately, there's still space in Shanghai

to plant huge fields of colorful flowers…

But at least there's been some pushback lately.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

China's Bike-Sharing Disaster

anxiety

episode

grab

desperate