Rented bikes, anyone?

Given the stranglehold that urban traffic has over most city dwellers, perhaps it’s time to consider alternative means of moving about, such as biking over short distances.

Most city dwellers do not work in the vicinity of their homes, so this is not about biking from Adenta to Ministries and arriving drenched in sweat!

More will be discussed in due course on the benefits of more biking versus less motoring. The global trend though is not for individuals to own the bikes that they ride, but to rent them for use when they are made available in the right place, at the right time.

Instead of riding your own bike all over the place (and worrying about how to secure it), you rent one from a pool and drop it off at a designated station closest to your destination.

The next user can pick that same bike and drop it off elsewhere, eliminating the need for everyone to own their own personal bike.  

This business model has been successfully established in many cities around the world, but the latest example from China shows that it may not always work as intended.

This Chinese bike-sharing company has reportedly gone out of business after 90 percent of its bikes went missing in the first five months. Chongqing-based Wukong Bikes has announced that the bulk of its 1,200 two-wheelers have been lost or stolen.

Unlike rivals, the firm did not put GPS trackers on its bikes, and by the time it realised the technology was necessary, money had run out. BBC News believes this to be the first bankruptcy of China's booming bike-sharing industry.

Touted as "Uber for bikes", China's tech giants have been funding sophisticated bike-hire businesses as a potential solution to congested roads.

Tencent-backed Mobike and Ofo, supported by Alibaba and Xiaomi, are currently dominating the market. But Wukong was positioned as a much smaller player, aimed mainly at students in the city.

 The founder of Wukong, Lei Houyi, admitted that as well as the lack of GPS, his firm had struggled because its bikes were of inferior quality, compared to those used by its larger competitors, adding that they were also too easily prone to damage and breakdown.

He went on to state that while users were initially charged, Wukong resorted to giving away bicycles rides for free to try and compete with other players, obviously cutting into potential revenues.      

The concept is similar to bike-sharing schemes that have been popularised in cities including London and Paris.

 In China however, rather than having fixed docking stations, all the firms are app based. In most cases, bikes are fitted with a GPS chip, allowing users to locate a bike. They pay for the hire with their smartphones and then unlock it - sometimes using a QR code.

After they have finished the journey, customers can then leave the bike anywhere. That has proved problematic at times, with bikes abandoned in remote locations where another rider was unlikely to find it or want it.

Mobike has tried to get around this problem by providing cash or credit rewards for users who hire these bikes, in the hope, they will end up somewhere more accessible.

The huge uptake of the scheme has caused conflicts on both roads and pavements in the major Chinese cities, as cyclists vie for space to move around, especially in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.

Similar schemes have opened up in Hong Kong and Singapore, with Ofo planning to launch in Cambridge in the UK. Bike Plus, an umbrella group for Britain's bike-sharing schemes, says that success relies on a range of factors.

For example, schemes benefit from an area with more than 50,000 homes, high employment, parking issues, a flat topography, and a favourable climate.

Will these winds blow our way anytime soon? Will the okada operators transition into bike-lenders? More importantly, are you willing to put time and energy into biking instead of driving? Time will tell.