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Tuesday June 20, 2017

SYDNEYSIDERS are getting ready to say goodbye to their transport woes next month, when the harbor city’s fi rst dockless bike-share venture is set to launch.

ReddyGo, a Sydney venture backed by China’s Bluegogo, will bring thousands of bikes over the coming months that can be unlocked by users with a smartphone app and cost 1.99 Australian dollars (US$1.48) for 30 minutes.

“Dockless bike share has the potential to transform travel in our city,” a Red-dyGo spokesperson told Fairfax Media.

“The fi rst 160 bikes will ship from China on Monday, but the plan is to put 6,000 bikes on greater Sydney’s streets within six months.”

Founder Donald Tang, who has lived in Sydney for 12 years, came up with the idea after the frustration of continually being late, the University of Technology Sydney graduate said.

He was inspired by a former classmate back in Anhui Province, who was listed by Forbes Magazine’s as one of China’s

“elite entrepreneurs under 30.”ReddyGo bikes will be supplied by

Binsen Tang’s Bluegogo, which is China’s third-largest bike-sharing business.

His company Elex-Tech, a mobile gaming venture which has 50 million users, will also be involved in building the app for ReddyGo. But like China, where competition is fi erce, the Austra-lian market may also quickly begin to heat up. In the city of Melbourne a company called Obike is already in operation and in September, Sydney University will launch a rival bike-share scheme called Airbike.

Another potential problem for the two-wheel venture, is that unlike China, Australia has strict helmet laws. This means ReddyGo bikes will come with a helmet and could easily become a target of thieves. But Tang believes he may have already solved that problem. “We will be happy if any user steals them, because there is a big logo on those helmets ... it will be free marketing,” Tang said.

(SD-Agencies)

Chinese Bike-share culture set to roll into Sydney

ReddyGo bikes will be supplied by Bluegogo, which is China’s third-largest bike-sharing business. File photo

IN their home market, China’s bike-sharing companies are charging full speed ahead. But in the West, they’re stuck in fi rst gear.

Throughout 2016 and into this year, thousands of bicycles fl ooded the streets of China, as startups vied to become the country’s “Uber for bikes.” Unlike with most bike-sharing schemes, the “dock-less” services that have emerged in China allow bikes to be parked anywhere, not just in designated racks.

This feature is a blessing and a curse — while there are usually plenty of bikes conveniently parked near you at any given moment, they’re also a bit of a mess, and bait for thieves and vandals.

That’s not stopping the companies from moving out of China, though. Mobike, a bike-sharing company based in Shanghai, announced last week it closed a US$600 million funding round to fi nance its international expansion. A few days before that, it said it would soon dump 1,000 bikes on the streets of Manchester, England, marking its fi rst major expansion outside of Asia (inside Asia, it’s also in Singapore).

It isn’t the only bike-sharing player from China to set its sights on the West. But the bike companies have expanded at a snail’s pace — suggesting that local regulations will handicap a Chinese-style bike boom in Western locations.

Both Chinese bike-sharing compa-nies and U.S.-based competitors have announced plans to bring the model stateside.

Bluegogo, which trails leaders Mobike and Ofo in popularity in China, announced in December it would launch in San Francisco. Ofo launched a trial run in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest festival in mid-March. In Silicon Valley, Limebike, founded by two

Chinese entrepreneurs, announced that same month it raised US$12 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prestigious venture capital fi rms in California. And Spin, headed up by alumni from Lyft and Y-Combinator, publicly unveiled itself to the tech world in January, and disclosed a US$8 million funding round soon after.

Yet despite ambitions to sweep the West, progress has not kept up with the pace seen in China.

In England, Ofo has had 20 bikes on the streets of Cambridge since April, but it has yet to expand its fl eet to China-style proportions. Limebike announced in June it had brought 125 bikes to the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — marking a start, but hardly the sign of a splash. Spin intends to put its bikes on the streets of Seattle by July, but it says it hasn’t reached an agreement with the city as to how many bikes it will deploy.

And as for Bluegogo’s foray in San Francisco, it already folded. Indeed the service started, and it has yet to launch anywhere else in the United States. Mobike, Limebike and Spin tell Quartz

they are in talks with other U.S. cities, but won’t specify which ones.

The slow pace stands in stark contrast to China, where Mobike, Ofo, and their ilk marked their arrival in a city by scat-tering bikes on nearly every street corner. It also differs from Uber, which got big in the United States by entering cities fi rst and dealing with angry municipal governments later.

What explains the lag? For start-ers, it’s much easier for regulators to control a bike-sharing company than a ride-hailing service like Uber. Whereas a quasi-legal Uber car is nearly untrace-able unless you’re actually in one, bike-shares are easy to spot and trace back to the company that owns them.

Current or former employees at Lime-bike, Bluegogo and Spin all say they have actively negotiated with local govern-ments in advance of a launch — unlike in China, where city regulators have struggled to catch up with the industry’s speed. But in the United States, these negotiations can make it impossible for the wheels to ever get moving.

Take San Francisco, for example. In

advance of its launch there, Bluegogo shipped hundreds of bikes, and kept them in a warehouse ready for deploy-ment, former employee Ilya Movshov-ich says. But once the government took notice of the plans, it passed regulations making it unfeasible for the company to operate there.

The new rules said such companies must pay the city to install more bike racks, reimburse it for the cost of citation and investigation of lost bikes, provide unlimited rides for low-income riders, and not “confl ict with existing contrac-tual bike share system.” The latter likely refers to Motivate, a New York-based company that provides docked bike-share schemes in partnerships (often exclusive ones) with many cities across the United States, including San Francisco.

To date, no dockless bike-share service has launched in San Francisco, a city syn-onymous with tech startups.

Other investors, however, see the United States and Britain as unprom-ising destinations. “I think that the business prospect will be smaller in the United States versus China,” says Jenny Lee, managing partner at GGV Capital. Her fi rm was an early investor in Didi (China’s answer to Uber) and has funded one minor player in China’s bike-sharing race.

For the model to work, Lee explains, “you can’t just have 100 bikes out there. You need to have 2,000 or 3,000 bikes out there. But if your population is too small or too widely spread out, that arrangement may not work.”

With 1,000 bikes set to enter Man-chester, Mobike will get bragging rights among its peers for the largest number of bikes deployed in a single Western city. Then it will have to repeat, again and again. (SD-Agencies)

China’s bike-sharing boom is hitting speed bumps in the West

Ofo launched a trial run in Austin, Texas, the United States, during the South by Southwest festival in mid-March. File photo