Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about renting basketballs but I do believe in bicycle sharing schemes. The article mentions the fairly recent entries in Singapore of "stationless" rental bikes, and I have seen first hand how this is going.

Sharing is appealing. And thanks to VC money, it's cheap. But as soon as it goes from a small local thing with passionate users to a big business with a big cross section of the overall population, dynamics change.

In Singapore the sharing companies are the present beneficiaries of a government "wait and see" period. The more popular they become, the more incidents occur that will do them no favours. Bikes dumped in rivers. Bikes parked in car traffic lanes on busy roads. Bikes parked in residential racks. Bikes hidden from view to prevent sharing.

This is ugly. This is what it looks like when your shared goods are widely adopted with no expensive enforcement. This is happening in Singapore, one of the most rule-abiding, nice cities in the world.

You want a million customers? The woodwork is buzzing.

It's not so bad. There are many cases as you mention but not so many as to be seriously problematic. My guess is eventually the novelty will wear off and people will mostly stop doing the negative things you mentioned. The dockless bikes are a dream come true for me and many others. The positives far outweigh the few bad eggs that you mention. A small section of Singaporeans are uniquely non-civic minded in my experience, possibly due to the nanny state they have grown up in. What you are seeing is a consequence of this. The dockless bike sharing companies have come from China and if it works for them in China it can work anywhere in the world.

Purely conjecture here as I'm not sure on the specifics of the rental system but surely there is some measure of accountability in operation?

I was under the impression that by scanning a qr code it registered the rental to your account, hence discouraging bad actor behaviour with the potential punishments for discarding or hoarding a bicycle that those actions would incur in fines etc.

If not, how difficult could this type of measure be to implement?

Regarding the bikes being kept for personal use, its a quirk of the way one of the bike-sharing systems worked. Ofo, one of the biggest players, didn't have any sort of GPS system on the bikes. Rather, each bike has a license plate with a numerical code, which, when put into an app, gives you a number for a padlock which will unlock the bike. Now, the number in the padlock doesn't change, so people quickly figured out that they could write down the code for the padlock, rip the license plate off the bike (or scratch off the number), and then no one else can use their bike.

I believe this company has added GPS tracking to the bikes now, but this was a pad enough product design flaw that it should have rendered this company incapable of making money. I haven't seen any numbers from them, but I would be extremely surprised to see them bringing in any significant revenue, nonetheless profits.

I haven't downloaded their app, but I've used their bikes a number of times, as they're currently littering the sidewalks of Shanghai, many with their locking mechanisms ripped off or permanently opened.

Nonetheless, this company was valued north of $1 Billion as of their last fundraising round.

Feels pretty bubble-ish to me.

Can you detect the difference between no one else renting the bike vs one person hoarding it in some way? If you can't, then it only takes a couple stories in the news of some innocent being charged fines to generate ill will.

Yes, you need to submit a photo of yourself along with your ID when you register an account. And bikes can be traced so there is accountability.

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