Name: Ofo's New Bike-Sharing Program Is A Lot Like Legal Bike Theft (HBO)
Uploaded: 2018-06-09T04:45:57.000Z
Duration: 4 min 21 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...

bright yellow commuter bicycles
appeared on the streets of Seattle,

Adverbs of degree

They come from a $2 billion Chinese startup called Ofo,

which is hoping the rollout
will give them an American toehold

Dexter Thomas reports from
the company's home base in Beijing,

where low-cost bike-sharing
is ubiquitous and big business.

— Zhang Jincheng is a maintenance worker.

the biggest company in
a new wave of bikeshare services.

Most bikeshare programs around the world
use docks to collect and dispense bikes.

you can leave your bike anywhere you want.

And if you see an Ofo bike you wanna use,

you just scan a code with your phone,
unlock it, and take off—

This kind of bike-sharing is new in China,

— Ofo was created in 2014 by college students
at Peking University.

It didn't expand off-campus until last November,

Ofo was the biggest bikeshare company in the world.

Ofo now operates in 150 cities,
including a few outside of China,

and it claims to have more than 100 million users

Thousands of new yellow bikes roll off the line every day,

— The original way of using bike is not that convenient.

If there is a bike that people can access
anywhere in the city at a very low cost

and can return with a very good convenience,

and joined the company last November
when they expanded off the college campuses.

Chinese tech giant Ali Baba
has poured millions into the company,

and Apple CEO Tim Cook visited
the company's headquarters earlier this year.

— How many people do you have
actually registered on the platform?

But in China, we have 1.3 billion,
so we still have some way to go, but…

— Okay, that's one way of looking at it, alright.

this is a return to the culture that
made China the so-called bicycle kingdom.

there were more than 500 million bikes in the country,

— Dr. Rong Jian is the Director of
the Beijing Traffic Engineering Association:

— But Rong admits there have been
a few issues with the bike boom:

Sidewalks and public walkways in popular areas
often get completely blocked off by bikes.

there have even been reports of hundreds
of bikes being thrown into massive piles.

Ofo had a trial run at the
University of California San Diego,

partially because people were parking
the bikes all over campus.

But they still have high hopes for Seattle.

— The goal here is that we're gonna go to
over 20 countries by the end of this year.

We wanna unlock every corner of the world,

and we wanna provide a bike
for people to use anytime, anywhere.

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Ofo's New Bike-Sharing Program Is A Lot Like Legal Bike Theft (HBO)

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