Manchester UK dumped hundreds of bicycles from a Chinese bike hire company into the canals (a la Boston Tea Party) and sends them packing
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/10/andy-burnham-dont-throw-manchester-hire-bikes-in-the-canal
Mayor Andy Burnham has pleaded with residents of Greater Manchester not to chuck its latest fleet of hire bikes into the canal when the region’s £17m rental scheme opens this month.
Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and a recent convert to cycling, admitted he was nervous about the launch of the Bee Bikes after their predecessors ended up swimming with the fishes.
“I would just say to people: these are your bikes, we own them. So, please look after them,” he said. “Damaging your own stuff doesn’t make sense.” He insisted he would rather they didn’t call them “Burnham Bikes” but stick to their Sunday name, inspired by Manchester’s civic symbol, the worker bee.
In 2017 Manchester was the first UK city to test dockless bike hire when the Chinese firm Mobike pedalled into town.
Within a year Mobike gave up, after hundreds of bikes each month ended up at the bottom of the Manchester Ship Canal and various other waterways. Others were strung up lampposts, abandoned in the Arndale shopping centre, locked in secure car parks and hidden in sheds. A startling number had their locks hacked off – and with them, their inbuilt GPS trackers.
He admitted being apprehensive in the run-up to the 18 November launch. “Vandalism is something that you don’t have control over,” he said. But he stressed that Greater Manchester police (GMP) had been involved in planning the scheme, whereas Mobikes were just “dumped on the street” with minimal notice.
As well as being too easy to pinch, Mobikes were also uncomfortable, having only one gear and apparently being designed for tiny people. “I’m only 5ft 8 and I still couldn’t get the saddle to go high enough,” said Boardman.
Phil Ellis, the chief executive of Beryl, insisted he had no hesitation to pitch for the contract. “It might have seemed that Manchester is the wild west, but it wasn’t really. Vandalism was not a unique problem to the city. It happens everywhere. We were thrilled to be selected to run the scheme,” he said.
Ultimately, the success of the Bee Bikes will not be simply down to how many remain roadworthy, but whether Mancunians like to ride them. A lot of that comes down to safety, said Graeme Sherriff, a researcher in healthy active cities at the University of Salford.
“The cycling environment generally is also a challenge. It has to be cycleable if you have a bike hire scheme,” he said. “Currently, Greater Manchester isn’t very cycle-friendly, but it is getting better.”
Boardman is trying to build 1,800 miles of safe walking and cycling routes as part of the Bee Network, but so far only a fraction of the network is complete after wranglings with Greater Manchester’s 10 councils.
Cycle hire failures …
Edinburgh’s Just Eat cycle hire scheme lasted three years before its operator, Serco, threw in the towel in September, saying it would not extend the contract amid higher-than-expected costs for vandalism. In 2020 about one in four of the scheme’s 550 bikes had to be repaired every week.
The CEO of Mobike admitted in a company blog that more than 200,000 of its bicycles were lost to theft or vandalism in 2019. It now no longer operates outside China.
Ofo, another Chinese firm, gave up on the UK in 2019 after ill-fated schemes in London, Norwich, Sheffield and Oxford.
(Article too long to post in its entirety)