Mobike Is a Hit in Beijing, Too. Can It Make Public Bikes Work Across China?

A bicycle has become Beijing's latest internet sensation.

Every night between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., big freight trucks with license plates from all over the country haul what the city needs into every corner of it.

From the small hours of August 15, the trucks rolling into Beijing after dark included some that had driven up from Jiangsu, each loaded with rows of orange-and-black bicycles. They stopped at certain intersections, and a few workers carried the brand-new bikes to the curb — usually near a subway entrance or an office building.

Once the bikes were off the truck, the workers scanned the QR code on each frame with a phone to "activate" it, then lined them up neatly along the road. Each bike weighs 24 kilograms, so lifting one is hard work. The five-spoke wheels carry luminous strips, which make the bikes easy to pick out from their surroundings even at night.

A Mobike marketing staffer who takes part in the drops told QDaily that this happens every few days. A drop can run until two or three in the morning, after which the crew goes out for barbecue together — "like team building," as she put it.

The next morning, passers-by drawn by the bright orange wheels and silver frame find "1 yuan a ride" written on the saddle, with QR codes on the handlebars and under the seat. Anyone who happens to need a bike may pull out WeChat, scan the code and download the app. One by one, the bikes travel from where they were dropped to everywhere else nearby.

Beijing Is a Poor City for Cycling. Mobike Took Off Anyway

Beijing is Mobike's home base, but the first city it went live in was Shanghai, where it had been running for four months by August, since April 22. As the headline on Mobike's WeChat official account put it on August 16, the company had decided to "come home for a visit," bringing its smart shared bikes from Shanghai to Beijing.

Riding a bike in Beijing is a good deal more trouble than riding one in Shanghai.

Shanghai has an urban fabric friendlier to bicycles: a dense web of small streets. Beijing's downtown streets are wider, often more than four lanes, and the city was laid out to move traffic along big ring roads and arterials — better for cars than for bikes. Bike lanes exist, but what you see at intersections every day are mostly food-delivery couriers in red, yellow and blue uniforms waiting out the light on electric scooters.

When traffic backs up, cars swing into the bike lanes to cut corners. On narrower side streets, the bike lane usually becomes a parking lot and no one objects. Beijing's serious cyclists, in helmets and on proper bikes, arrange to ride late at night, when the roads are empty enough to suit a bicycle.

Mobike caught on here fast all the same.

Since it arrived on August 15, both attention and downloads have shot up. On its 14th day in the city, peak demand exceeded server capacity and the service briefly went down.

That did not cool anyone's enthusiasm. Mobike, which has almost no marketing budget, passed Dianping, Baidu Nuomi and other well-known apps spending heavily ahead of the new school term, and broke into the App Store's overall top 100.

Every Mobike has GPS inside, and data from the company's dashboard shows the bikes spreading outward from Zhongguancun, the part of the city with the highest concentration of founders and tech companies.

Congestion is the likely reason. Beijing's traffic is far worse than Shanghai's. For the last mile, a bicycle may be the best answer — a carpool ride might cost only 5 or 6 yuan, but what people can less afford is the time spent stuck in it.

August and September are also among the best months of the year to ride in Beijing. The worst heat is over, and the weather has been clear for weeks, long enough to let people forget that in two months the air and the temperature may both make going outside unpleasant. Plenty of people who never used to ride have been posting about Mobike on social media.

"When we put bikes out, we put them where we think some kind of ecosystem might exist," Mobike founder Hu Weiwei told QDaily. The company started with a few bikes near its Zhongguancun office, then picked other spots it considered important, such as the East Third Ring Road.

Once it had enough data, the destination of each late-night run was calculated. The main measure is how many people open the Mobike app near a given place to look for a bike.

That recalls how Uber operated: one of its tests for entering a city was how many people there opened the Uber app to see whether they could get a car. As it happens, Mobike's CEO and co-founder, Wang Xiaofeng, used to be Uber Shanghai's general manager.

Public Bikes Are Nothing New, but Mobike Used Technology to Fix What Was Broken

On Mobike's 15th day in Beijing, a QDaily reporter riding one of the bikes was flagged down at a red light by Mr. Li, a man in his fifties.

Li retired several years ago and now volunteers keeping order at a bus stop. He had kept seeing people ride these orange bikes past his stop, and finally had to ask what they were.

Told what Mobike charges, he suggested the reporter go ask about Beijing's municipal public bikes at the Jinsong transport service point two kilometers away. "The first hour of each ride is free, and after that it's only a yuan an hour."

On the actual business of getting a card he was vague, and only advised us to go while it was still light and the service point was still open.

Public bikes with a free first hour have been in Beijing for a while. City bike systems are hardly new; Europe has had them since the 1960s.

The model is much the same in cities around the world: residents and visitors rent a bike at a fixed station with a transit card or bank card, return it to a station when they are done, and pay by the time used.

Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Taiyuan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen — plenty of Chinese cities run municipal public bike systems. Beijing alone has 50,000 bikes you can rent by swiping a subway card. But Mobike is the first bike project to become this popular.

Traditional public bikes sit at dedicated docking posts; Mobike's bikes have no fixed place in the city. Each one holds an IoT SIM card and a GPS unit, and the app shows where every Mobike in the city is. A registered user finds the nearest one on the map, scans its QR code to unlock it, and rides away.

A new user who spots a Mobike on the street downloads the app, verifies their real name with an ID number and pays a 299-yuan deposit to start. The system credits a new account with 1 yuan, enough for a free half hour. Payment all happens online, through WeChat and Alipay, the two most widely used options.

Beijing's public bikes, by contrast, require a trip to a fixed service point with an ID document and a deposit. The bikes can be borrowed in one place and returned in another across the city, but because each district has its own operator, a problem with your card account has to be sorted out at the point where you signed up. Service points are usually at subway stations, though not every station issues cards, and they may not open on weekends.

The biggest difference between Mobike and a traditional public bike is really in returning it. You find a white line at the curb where bikes can be parked free, close the lock by hand, and the bike appears on other users' maps for someone else to scan and ride.

Beijing's public bike system publishes station maps on its WeChat official account and its website, but ride one once and, unless you know where the stations are, returning the bike can take some effort.

Hu Weiwei bought a bicycle herself before she started the company, and gave up on it after a few months. Getting where she was going often meant riding tens of kilometers, and the question of what to do with the bike if she wanted to switch to another form of transport halfway was enough on its own to keep a person from riding at all.

The Hardware Changed a Great Deal Over the Past Six Months, Too

From January 2015, when she began preparing to start the company, Hu Weiwei wanted product and design to fix what public bike schemes had never fixed: activation by hand, docking posts to borrow and return at, constant maintenance.

She did not set out to build a factory. She wanted to contract the manufacturing out, the way municipal projects buy bikes from Flying Pigeon, Forever or Giant.

But "four years without maintenance" meant designing the bike from scratch, and the parts that needed new tooling made finding a factory very hard. After looking at plants around Tianjin, Shenzhen and Shanghai, Mobike built its own, to make a bicycle fit for shared outdoor use.

Since the first mass-production prototype was assembled on March 17, the bike has been revised countless times. Some of the earliest users in Shanghai still remember a model with wheels much larger than today's; that lemon-yellow batch, nicknamed the "Bumblebee," was built only to test the operating model, and was retired long ago because it did not last long enough.

What people see on the street now is the second generation.

Because these bikes stand outdoors 24 hours a day, all year round, and are not handled gently, the design team put durability first.

• A bearing drive in place of a chain, so there is no chain to slip off;
• Orange hubs and an all-aluminum silver frame, for recognition — the first prototype was black;
• Solid, puncture-proof tires that wear only slightly over 20,000 kilometers and never need pumping;
• A built-in IoT chip and GPS, with the smart lock charged by pedaling;
• No basket and no adjustable seat, to cut down on the bad experiences that broken parts cause

Together these choices produced the bike as it now is. The orange five-spoke hubs are unmistakable — in Hu Weiwei's words, "from a distance it looks like two bicycle wheels floating there, very distinctive, like part of the city."

But a seat you cannot raise means anyone over 1.75 meters cannot straighten their legs, and the bike weighs nearly twice what an ordinary bicycle does. Comfort remains the complaint people make most often about Mobike.

Unless you want to ride a gym spin bike every day, Mobike is not the thing for a longer trip.

ofo, a startup that got into campus bike-sharing before Mobike, chose a cheaper model: ordinary bicycles painted a uniform yellow, fitted with an electronic lock, and put into service. Early on it even encouraged users to put their own bikes on the platform and turn them into shared ones.

But ordinary bicycles wear out faster, and a bike ridden off campus costs several times more to operate than one circulating inside it. To hold those costs down, ofo staff at the gates of Peking University check bikes being ridden off campus: only users who pay a larger deposit can rent the even-numbered bikes allowed to leave.

Mobike keeps trying new manufacturing methods. A recent batch shipped to Beijing may feel heavier to ride — those few hundred bikes use a new kind of tire — while the newest batch in Shanghai has baskets. In future Mobike is also considering nanomaterials, which would make a bike "useless to steal" and cut the risk of theft.

For now, with the product still changing and users still learning, Mobike is some way from its goal of "four years with no operations." "At this point, if one bike has a problem, we go and deal with that one bike," Hu Weiwei said at the launch event, adding that the company is still working out the best rules.

Using Technology to Spread Public Bikes: The Hard Part Has Only Just Begun

To keep operating costs down, Mobike built a credit-score system that enlists users in maintenance. Every new user starts at 100 points; each ride adds points, and breaking the rules costs them.

So the next rider can find the bike, users have to park inside the white lines at the curb. Parking in a hutong, a residential compound or an office building is a violation, and each kind costs a different number of points.

A user who finds a badly parked bike can report it in the app and upload details and photos to help the operations staff locate it. The person who reports gains credit points and the offender loses them. Below 80 points, the fare rises from 1 yuan per half hour to a punitive 100 yuan per half hour.

Also to help people find bikes, Mobike asks users to photograph the surroundings after parking and upload the picture; if other users rate it useful, the uploader earns credit points. On a map that suffers GPS drift, finding a bike by photograph really is much easier.

Open the app today and you will often see pop-ups about the penalties for parking in the wrong place and for riding outside the Fifth Ring Road. "If you enforce those rules very strictly, it produces goodwill," Hu Weiwei said.

For now, though, neither the traffic dangers created by road design nor the heavy wear caused by how people behave is something a company can fix on its own.

One user wheeled a bike into his home; staff could not reach him and called the police, and when the officers arrived at his door he threw the bike off the balcony. Operations staff have also fished bikes out of water, tracked one through tall grass by following its locator chime, and climbed to the 19th floor to retrieve one from a stairwell. It is not unusual for a user to circle the spot on the map for half an hour without finding the bike, or to find it and see that someone has scratched out the QR code.

Five months after launch, Mobike has not yet met its season of fastest wear.

Winter and spring bring the north's worst smog, the months when a raindrop lands on you as a spot of mud. After half a year sitting outside, how many people will still want to ride — even a bike with an all-aluminum body chosen to keep it from rusting? No one can say.

The bigger problem is cost. Mobike has put more than 10,000 bikes on the streets of Shanghai; Beijing's urban area is 2.5 times Shanghai's and will need more. Each bike costs several thousand yuan to build, and even at four hours of use a day it would take more than a year to earn that back — before counting damage.

No urban public bike system anywhere in the world has yet made money.

Beijing's and Shanghai's existing systems are government-led: the government puts up the start-up money, companies run the service, and the operators carry the cost of staff, repairs and parts.

YouBike was built and is run by the Taiwanese bicycle brand Giant under contract to the Taipei city government, but building the system took a substantial public investment of its own. The supporting bike lanes, for one, cost the city considerable effort. Taipei long wavered between carving a bike lane out of an existing road and widening the sidewalk to fence one off; it now mostly does the latter.

Seven years in, Taiwan's YouBike may be one of the most successful city bike systems in the world.

It launched a companion app four years ago. Its figures show more than 100 million rides taken and more than 6 million memberships.

After a 48-hour outage in August, one local taxi company said its business rose 5–10%.

But even Taipei, which runs public bikes about as well as anyone, cannot make them pay, and survives on support from the government and Giant.

Some companies have tried to solve that with high prices.

Take Bay Area Bike Share, the most widespread public bike service in San Francisco, which covers the city and the Silicon Valley towns to its southeast.

Behind it is a company called Motivate, which already runs public bikes in ten cities including Boston, Portland and Washington. Registering requires a US$101 deposit on a credit card, and a day's use costs $9, with extra charges for any single ride over 30 minutes. An Uber carpool within San Francisco caps out at $6, so the price is not competitive.

Perhaps because the price is too high and the return points too few, at noon on September 5, Labor Day in the United States, a QDaily reporter waited an hour and a half at the Bay Area Bike Share station outside San Francisco City Hall. People trickled over to look, but in the end not a single bike was ridden away.

Mobike has not worked out how it will make money. Both Hu Weiwei and CEO Wang Xiaofeng have said in interviews that they are not thinking about profit yet, and are concentrating on user growth.

As a startup with a new model, Mobike already has substantial government backing. Its Shanghai office recently moved into the Knowledge and Innovation Community in Yangpu District, part of a strategic cooperation agreement with the district government. Yangpu has given it preferential terms, and for several days running a large advertising screen in Wujiaochang, the district's main commercial center, played Mobike's promotional video.

"What Mobike is doing has more of a public-good character. This business is, to some degree, a public undertaking." That is the line Hu Weiwei has been repeating most often lately.

By bringing technology to public bikes, Mobike has solved a good number of problems. But building a public bike system that China actually uses is probably beyond any commercial company.

Cover image and in-article photographs from Mobike; screenshots from actual use