> Culturally it shouldn't be to different from France.

I'm French and living in Germany, I laughed while reading this. The countries are close to each others but the culture is different, especially concerning vandalism/individualism. I have many examples like the cleanliness of public spaces to the state of public bikes (comparing Velib' v. StadtRAD, the German version works way better), the general feeling being that French people undervalue the impact of one's acts on a global community, leading to the situation described in the article.

Ask a German why do they pay more for health instances than in France and they will answer "Our debt is going down, our kids will not pay more than us and the system should work in the long term.", I had never heard that thought before moving outside of France.

Germany seems to operate under the Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never sit in.” I’m quite envious of them as a culture (being American).

Maybe the difference is that one worked with the city / people to set it up, and the other mostly dumped a bunch of bikes everywhere? (and doesn't pay for any of the negative externalities that comes with it).

People have been known to throw bikes of the city-sanctioned system (Velib) in the river too. Apparently 16000 were vandalized in the first two years of operation alone.

But even in Germany there has been a fair amount of vandalism against new bike sharing companies.

In Munich, Deutsche Bahn has successfully operated a dockless bike sharing scheme for more than a decade. Last year, oBike dumped thousands of bikes in the streets, and these have been subject of quite a bit of vandalism. The reason is probably that the introduction was poorly managed. They literally dumped a huge number of bikes in the streets overnight, which was a bit of a nuisance and probably kind of invited vandalism.

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.

They make a massive amount of money from rental deposits which are never refunded unless you remember to click the refund button in the app.

A lot of people forget to refund their own deposit, and the rental company gets to keep a lot of money.

A great deal of the deposits are made during discount/promotional periods.