page_title: Bicycle-sharing system
section_title: Dangers of over-supply
hierarchical_section_title: Bicycle-sharing system / Economic impact / Dangers of over-supply
caption_attribution_description: English: A shared bicycle was discarded in the grass. 中文（简体）‎: 一辆共享单车被丢弃在草丛中。
context_page_description: A bicycle-sharing system, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share scheme, is a service in which bicycles are made available for shared use to individuals on a short term basis for a price or free. Many bike share systems allow people to borrow a bike from a "dock" and return it at another dock belonging to the same system. Docks are special bike racks that lock the bike, and only release it by computer control. The user enters payment information, and the computer unlocks a bike. The user returns the bike by placing it in the dock, which locks it in place. Other systems are dockless.
  For many systems, smartphone mapping apps show nearby available bikes and open docks. In July 2020, Google Maps began including bike shares in its route recommendations.
context_section_description: Many bike-share companies and public-private partnerships aim to supply shared bicycles as a public good. In order for bike-shares to be a public good, they must be both non-excludable and non-rival. Numerous bike-share programs already offer their services partly for free or at least at very low prices, therefore nearing the non-excludable requirement. However, in order to achieve the non-rival requirement, shared bicycles must be supplied at a certain density within an urban area. There are numerous challenges with attaining non-rivalry, for instance, redistribution of bicycles from low-demand regions to regions with high-demand. Mobike, a China-based company, is attempting to solve this problem by paying their users to ride their bikes from low-demand areas to high-demand areas. Other companies such as OBike have introduced a points system to penalize negative behavior, namely, illegal parking of shared bicycles. Economists speculate that a combination of efficient pricing with well-designed regulatory policies could significantly mitigate problems of over-supply and clutter.
  The Chinese bicycle-sharing market demonstrated the danger of oversupply in 2018. Companies took advantage of unclear regulations in the preceding years to introduce millions of shared bikes to the country's cities. Users were not educated in how to use the systems properly and in many cases treated them as disposable, parking them anywhere. City governments were forced to impound the abandoned bikes when they blocked public thoroughfares, and millions of bikes went directly to junkyards after the companies that owned them went bankrupt.
caption: A shared bicycle was discarded in the grass.
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