The "micromobility" trend has taken over the world in recent years, promising to allow us maximum mobility at minimal cost and free us from the private car stuck in traffic jams in favor of bicycles and scooters that can be rented through an app. However, these services are not always successful, and this fact has led to a new phenomenon of "cemeteries" for shared two-wheeled vehicles, especially bicycles, around the world – especially in China. About the country where this problem has developed and grown to monstrous proportions we will tell you with the help of ChatGPT.
Shared bicycles are considered one of the "Four Great New Inventions" to come from China. They first appeared on the Peking University campus in May 2015, and were designed to allow students to move quickly between the university buildings and nearby public transport stops. Within two years, the popularity of such services soared, with more than 70 companies deploying some 27 million bicycles across China. The bright and distinctive colors of each brand became common on city streets – but soon began to be identified not with convenient transport, but with great unpleasantness.
In September 2017, the Chinese government realized that bike-sharing had become a problem, interfering with pedestrian and car traffic. It imposed towers on the number of bicycles deployed, and all the rest were moved to sites called "shared bike cemeteries." These hidden locations, scattered in different cities of the country, have become a kind of huge and colorful fields, where instead of flowers or trees each color is many thousands of bicycles of a certain brand that has exceeded its quota or gone bankrupt.
A photographer who has traversed the length and breadth of China since January 2018 has documented more than 50 such cemeteries in breathtaking drone footage, 360-degree virtual reality cameras, separate recordings of the sounds made by bicycles whose batteries are still active, and more. The aim of the project was to raise awareness of the undesirable environmental consequences of sharing bicycles.
The photos caused a stir when they were published – not only in China, but around the world, as the trend of sharing bicycles and scooters has already conquered many countries. In Israel, we have already seen companies entering and exiting the market – Chinese Oppo removed its yellow bicycles from the streets of Gush Dan at the end of 2018. A few months later, Mobike did the same with its orange bike. This year, electric scooter companies also began to abandon us, when in June Germany's Tir announced the collection of all its turquoise scooters from Israel, and yesterday it was joined by Wind, a German-Spanish company owned by Russia's Yandex that operates many hundreds of yellow scooters here. Electric two-wheelers are more expensive and are usually transported to other countries – but in the United States it has recently been reported that even scooters, which cost thousands of shekels per unit, are thrown away by the thousands near the border with Mexico due to the conclusion of companies that it is cheaper to throw them away than to transport them.
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