Bike sharing in China has been a roller coaster of boom and bust. While several services have caught on with consumers, the bubble has been marked with outpaced growth and rampant mismanagement. Tangled piles of unused bikes with no where to go have been a familiar site on streets of major Chinese cities.
Bluegogo, once the third largest service, shut down a few months ago and was acquired by China’s leading ride hailing company Didi, which also runs a bike sharing service.
At the moment, a parking lot in Beijing crammed with unused bikes is a reminder of Bluegogo’s once massive scale and rapid decline. Photos from European Pressphoto Agency show an army of nearly 70,000 bikes sitting, while they wait for repairs.
It was reported in January that Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride hailing company, purchased part of Bluegogo and planned to redeploy some of its bikes. That may have hit a snag as two large Chinese cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have suspended the service from adding new bikes out of concerns of too rapid growth.
