A Brief History of Shared Bikes: A Love & Hate Relationship

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Shared bikes (gongxiang danche) line almost every street in major Chinese cities, and it has become hard to remember what life was like before the sidewalks became jammed with them.

However, many of us can still recall the days when there were haphazardly piled stacks of bikes blocking walkways around the city.

Over the years, the system has been honed, with designated no-parking areas and easy in-app features for reporting broken bikes, which has alleviated many of the problems the program had in its early days.

Image via Ai

Now, shared bikes are – for most of us – a convenient and popular way to get around the city, without the hassle of maintaining or worrying about losing a personal bicycle.

China’s bike sharing market is the largest in the world – it is five times that of India, which is the second largest in the world. There are around 15 million shared bikes lining the streets across China; the majority are operated by Meituan, Hellobike, and Didi Qingdu.

In the last decade, the bike sharing landscape has already seen the rise and fall of multiple companies. Most of those that have survived were absorbed or started by China’s tech giants, such as Hellobike which is run by Alipay.

Image via sohu.com

Since shared bikes are such a fixture of life in China, we decided to dive a bit deeper into the history of how it all began.

Although the concept of bike sharing can be traced back to Amsterdam in the 1960s, China is the pioneer of the modern practice.

Launched in 2008, the Hangzhou Publish Bicycle System was the first bike-sharing system in China. It utilized a fixed docking station with coin and smart-card payment systems.

Hangzhou Public Bike System. Image via Ai

Despite the program’s initial growth, when dockless shared bikes were introduced, the system fell out a favor and we can still see the empty docks of similar programs throughout China.

Dockless smartphone enabled bike sharing began with two major competitors: Mobike and Ofo. Founded in 2014 in Beijing, Ofo was the pioneer of the smartphone app bike-sharing model – in the next few years, dozens of companies would join the market.

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