Gobee.bike pulls out of France due to mass destruction of its bike fleet

I work for a public transportation company (buses) that offers bikes for rent.

We experience the same vandalism problems in our little French town of 50k inhabitants.

The bikes are thrown in rivers, stolen and found in Africa, burned, thrown from the 14th floor etc etc

We hired 4 people whose sole job is to fetch and repair those bikes.

Tax payer money well spent?

> stolen and found in Africa

That was unexpected. How do they end up in Africa? Sounds like there is an interesting story there. I can see teenagers stealing them, throwing them from a roof, vandalizing them, but how in the world do they have the dedication to ship them to a different continent. I guess it could be "a challenge" to impress their peers.

There's another bike company here in (SE)Asia, OBike. They're pretty big, and aggressively fundraising. I told my wife, "I can understand that people want to Uber-ify everything, but this is very different than Uber concept, so I think it won't work in the long term."

The main difference is.. who's looking after the vehicle.

With Uber, the vehicle is typically owned by the driver, so the driver has interest in making sure the customers (riders) don't vandalize it. Not only that, it's in the driver's best interest to keep the vehicle maintained.

With these bike sharing companies, nobody except the company owns the bike. And since nobody is watching over the customers, they don't feel the need to behave.

You can say, "Just force them to put deposit, and if the bike is damaged, deduct their deposit." Well, how do you know if the bike is damaged by them, and not random bypassers?

For some reason nobody talks about the extreme nuisance of those bikes. Customers would just drop them literally anywhere: on the sidewalk blocking pedestrians, right in the middle of the street blocking cars, in front of building doors preventing people from entering, etc... Such a terrible nuisance, and something to be expected since there is such little room in the Parisian streets (you can’t seriously expect customers to drop their bike in a proper location if there are so few of them).

Long story short, I’m glad to see them go, even though I would have preferred them to be banned rather than vandalized.

The story I've been hearing is that the sole idea behind most chinese bikesharing companies outside of China is to move vast sums of money out of the country, even if that means dealing with quite a few losses. Obviously just a theory, but I find it amusing.