Share bikes were always doomed to fail

DISCARDED share bikes are cluttering our streets. But it’s not because we’re such yobbos we can’t be trusted with a pushie, it’s because the model is fundamentally flawed, writes James Morrow.

WHAT is the proper collective noun for a pile of discarded share bikes?

If ants march in an army, and collection of crows is a murder, how should we describe the piles of pushbikes that litter our footpaths, parks, and in one incident this columnist may or may not know anything about, a mate’s drawing room after a party?

Perhaps a “catastrophe” of share bikes would be appropriate, a colourful shout-out to the botched way in which the things have been rolled out across Australia.

Though personally I would vote for the all-purpose swear from the greatest children’s movie that’s really for adults ever made, the 2009 stop-motion animation number The Fantastic Mr Fox: “Clustercuss”.

Yes, a clustercuss of share bikes. That will do nicely.

But while the rest of us swear at the damn things, at least one council is starting do something to un-cuss the situation.

Waverley Council in Sydney’s east has declared war on share bikes, and from this Monday will start impounding damaged or abandoned bikes.

A “clustercuss” of share bikes mar the landscape on Bondi Beach. (Pic: Instagram)

Local mayor John Wakefield announced the policy earlier this week, saying of the various companies behind the bikes, “They need to manage their operation in a way that does not cause public disruption and the collection and redistribution of bikes must be a priority for the operators.”

In other words, share bike companies, use it or lose it.

And more power to them. After all, this sort of thing — improving amenity — is exactly what local government should be about, not grandstanding on gay marriage or Middle East peace while making ratepayers hang on longer for approval to put in a guest bathroom than East Berliners used to have to wait for the keys to a Trabant.

That said, it’s still worthwhile asking just how we ended up with heavy and unwieldy bikes that no one ever seems to ride winding up everywhere from up trees to down the bottom of the Yarra River.

When the plague first started, the easy temptation was to blame our fellow Australians for being such a bunch of yobbos we couldn’t even be trusted with a pushie.

As one academic who compared how the bikes were treated here versus in Singapore put it on The Conversation website, we Australians are too individualistic and disrespectful of authority to be trusted.

Thousands of damaged bicycles in need of repair that were pulled off the streets in Beijing, China. (Pic: Kevin Frayer)

But this is wrong for a number of reasons, and not just because the default position of pretty much all academics is that we should stop being so individualistic and instead defer to a higher authority, preferably theirs.

First of all, it’s oikophobic, which is just a fancy way of saying it’s a line of reasoning full of condescending superiority and disdain for our fellow countrymen. British philosopher Roger Scruton defined the term best when he said it was “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’.”

As this column has noted previously, Australians are already far too competent at running the country down.

Secondly, it’s hardly as if Australia is the only country where this is a problem.

China, which is generally thought of as far more collective in its thinking and deferential to authority in its mindset, is now littered with share bike graveyards.

No, the real issue is simply one of supply and demand. That is, too much supply from companies looking to rake in deposits off the back of bikes that cost them virtually nothing, and too little demand for bikes that aren’t a lot of fun to ride and which users don’t have any responsibility for.

Far from being a market failure, it’s exactly how things should work. As capitalist as the share bike companies might be, they build a collectivist model that fails pretty much every time anyone rolls the dice on it.

Namely, when people are given something to use but not own, those somethings (whatever they are) will soon wind up in trees or at the bottom of the drink.

Or to put it another way, the schemes are all share, no responsibility.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
@pwafork

Originally published as Share bikes were always doomed to fail