INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightAlex BorwickImage caption
Bike-sharing is set to revolutionise transport across the world, as it already
has done in Shanghai
Cycling around cities may have been pioneered by the Dutch, but a new high-tech way of hiring bicycles
is bidding to bringing a pedal power revolution to cities around the world
The key innovation is the dockless hire bike
Found and unlocked with a few taps on a smartphone, they can be hired for an hour, day, or week - then locked up and left wherever the
journey ends, rather than a special docking area
These now make up the majority of the 18 million self-serve, public-use bikes around the world, in 1,608 cities.That's up from just two
million at the end of 2016, says Russell Meddin, co-author of an online world map of bike sharing.Most of this growth has been in China,
where two start-ups, rich with backing from the country's rival giant business groups, are battling for dominance on the streets.Image
copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
These are not crops but rows of abandoned shared bikes in China
Ofo
is backed by the e-commerce giant Alibaba, while Tencent Holdings - Asia's richest company - is championing Mobike.Alex Borwick, who lives
between Shanghai and Beijing, was an early Mobike user
She calls bike sharing "much easier than having your own bike as you don't have to carry a lock and worry".And she "definitely" has used the
service more for being dockless, because it "means you can take a bike to where you need to go, not to a dock".This duel saw some 1.5
million bikes pushed onto the streets of Shanghai alone
But the battle for market share left mountains of castaway bicycles in fields near Shanghai and places like Xiamen in the south-east."There
were and are some bicycle mountains, but now there seem to be fewer now," says Jady Liu, an undergraduate student at Beijing Normal
University.Media captionPutting the brakes on China's bike mountainIn September, China's large cities prohibited companies from putting
any new bikes onto the roads and since then the mountains have started to disappear
Mobike has spread to 100 cities, including Manchester in 2017 and Berlin earlier this year."China's ones are the only truly global [bike
sharing schemes]," says Mobike's Steve Pyer, a veteran of London's "Boris Bike" cycle hire scheme.Cheaper infrastructureAside from the
convenience of being able to leave it anywhere, dockless bikes are massively cheaper to run than these more familiar dock-based schemes
copyrightMobikeImage caption
Dockless bikes are massively cheaper to run than these more familiar dock-based schemes
Moving the locking and payment technology from the dock to the bicycle means you can deploy them very quickly.GPS sensors help
riders locate available bikes on a smartphone app, and booking and unlocking is done by scanning a QR code or using RFID (radio frequency
The onboard tech is powered by a battery charged by a dynamo as the cyclist pedals
The success of the bikes in China has attracted investors' interest
to San Francisco business intelligence company Crunchbase.Karan Girotra, a professor at Cornell University's new graduate programme,
Cornell Tech, says there is a rush to be first into new markets, with firms betting that "once you get in there, you will acquire customers
and drive other competitors out of business."Image copyrightAlex BorwickImage caption
"You can take a bike to where you
need to go, not to a dock, says Alex Borwick
And while the largest traditional dock-based system in east China's Hangzhou
has 65,000 bikes, the start-up Ofo operates 10 million, says Prof Girotra.With traditional dock-based systems - like those in London and
Paris - "people loved it but costs turned out to be higher, and advertising revenue turned out to be lower", he says.Economies of scale
bring down the cost per bike for the Chinese companies to "well under $100" rather than "$3,000 to $5,000" for dock-based systems, he
adds.Machine learningDockless bike riders don't always leave the bikes in the ideal places for other riders to start their journeys, so the
scheme operators do have to move them around
In Oslo, one start-up has been using machine learning - a sophisticated form of data analysis - to predict how to distribute bikes most
efficiently.Image copyrightUrban Infrastructure PartnerImage caption
Bike-sharers in Oslo
"We try to
maximise the number of trips each bike takes before we need to move it again," says Axel Bentsen, chief executive of Urban Infrastructure
Partner, which runs Oslo's bike sharing programme
"It's very difficult to do that manually, and machine learning is finding patterns and suggesting changes we wouldn't be able to come up
with ourselves." Car-sharing interestCar-sharing companies are eager to branch into bike-sharing for passengers' short trips at the end of a
journey.In April, Uber bought New York-based start-up Jump Bikes, paying nearly $200m, according to TheIndianSubcontinent.Meanwhile Uber's
rival in India, Ola, introduced a bike-sharing service late last year called Ola Pedal.And Singapore-based Grab, another Uber rival, backed
a dockless bike-sharing service called oBike last year.More Technology of BusinessImage copyrightMagnum PhotosLucrative dataProf Girotra
says data about our biking habits could also prove quite lucrative."If you want to know where people are, they can turn off mobile phones,
but with a bike you know precisely at which shop they've pulled up," explains Steven Fleming, founder of Australian and Dutch consultancy
Cycle Space.It may be a while before the rest of the world catches up with Amsterdam, where 66% of all trips are made by bike.But it is the
unlikely combination of venture capital and Chinese internet giants that could get us there sooner than we expect.Follow Technology of
Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook
