That photo seems to come from this article, where there are 20 more similar pictures. Unbelievable: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...

Wow, this is basically what it looks like when I play Factorio with no clue about ratios.

To me it looks like what would happen if you add a hundred thousand bikes in blender and just let the physics engine form a pile.

Spoiler: a massive pile of Ofo (yellow), Mobike (orange) and Bluegogo (blue) bikes scrapped after China's share bike boom went bust.

How does anyone justify that kind of waste?

For a second it generated a lot of profit for shareholders - thats enough for most.

What will it take to help these people see how incredibly irresponsible, undefendably wasteful and doomed this approach to product-making is? 'If it doesn't work for us we don't care about that'?

Its akin to removing repairability from products designed to be inseparable from eternal profit-taking. What the much-touted 'free market' they talk up really wants is product that lasts and/or can be fixed or repurposed. I've never heard anyone say 'I love to buy crap' or 'I'm okay with buying a new one frequently'. What they mean by 'free' - of regulation - is unsustainable.

Some people are materialistic - that is they place a high value on material things. It's often older people who grew up when manufactured goods were valuable. I'm like this myself.

Other people aren't - they don't form an emotional bond with a used electric motor or an empty drink bottle. They just use whatever's available and focus on other aspects of their life besides material objects. I think this is more normal for young people who grew up with plentiful cheap products and all these renting and sharing services. For them, the value is in the use, not the possession.

Half of the US and almost all of the world can't afford to be wasteful for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with emotional attachments.

People react emotionally to waste not because of emotional attachments to things but because wasting feels shameful to people who worry about having enough. I wonder how many poor people could have been helped by a free electric bike. Unfortunately this would potentially compete with ubers services.

Even if they're sold, they're not going to go to poor people. If poor people could improve their lives with a scooter that requires money, skills and effort to charge and maintain it, they wouldn't be poor. The whole reason they're poor is they don't do useful things, not because they can't afford useful stuff. This is developed country poor people I'm talking about. If they were concerned about waste, they wouldn't spend so much of their little money on drugs, alcohol, and McDonalds.

I agree with the shameful thing. But a lot of older people do have enough yet they carry the emotional baggage of their poor younger selves. I know people who save old broken appliances with the aim of repairing or selling them oneday but eventually realized nobody wants a box of old electrical plugs or a broken washing machine from the 1970's when even the poorest people are given free money to buy a washing machine by social welfare and used electrical cables are practically free.

Your perspective is positively dystopian. You literally have no understanding of the issues that others face that are materially different than your own. The majority of the poor are all around you doing useful work not drinking and drugging their imaginary free money you think welfare gives them to buy washing machines away. The rich and the poor often face the same challenges. For example they do stupid things. They lose a job. They develop a medical condition. They fail some classes. Someone around them dies. The get divorced. Money means you have tools to get past roadblocks knowing that in the meanwhile your entire life wont disintegrate beneath you if you stall out for a short period of time. The poor instead watch their life fall apart trivially easily and fall between the cracks or more often soldier on leading lessor but still productive lives.

They are often poor because although they do a substantial degree of useful work society doesn't value the work they do very much because there is more than enough people available to do it instead of starving. This is how economics works. Let me reiterate, most poor people in America work! Your particular myopic world view is common enough it has a name. The just world hypothesis. I'm sorry you can't see the people around you very clearly. I'm poor. Nobody has ever offered me money to buy a washing machine. I don't do drugs. I don't like McDonald's. I don't get drunk. I have a job but my wife cant due to medical issues and receives no help of any kind because of it. Most of my money goes to buy food, shelter and medical care. If you walked by me you wouldn't notice that I looked especially poor. I dress decently but virtually my entire wardrobe is courtesy of better class thrift stores where I paid aprox $2 per item. Last year I probably spent about 30% of my earnings on medical insurance + care alone.

Exactly this. Sometimes when I recycle something like a glass jar, I have this vision of a parent 1000 years from now in a post-apocalypse society, trying to bring a little clean water to their village, and how much they might appreciate that clean glass jar.

a riff on this https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5-lDJWCUAAwfya.jpg ?

Scrappers will get as much value as they can out of the things they take, whether that's selling something that works, breaking it down into parts that can be reused, or going all the way to raw materials.

VCs are willing to take risks, with some justification: people can only innovate if they're given permission to fail.

Nothing less innovative than yet another bike sharing app. I see so few people using these bikes. I can't understand the value proposition for VCs to invest in them.

The waste is really just in manufacturing-hours, and even that’s not too bad because, hey, the workers got paid.

Metal is quite recyclable and the paths for doing so are extremely well-trod.

They’ll melt the scrap, fear not.

As for the energy requirements and the associated CO2 output with all that production and recycling... burn baby burn. Or should that be "burn mother Earth burn"?

Covid-19 has made me forget that IMO we have about 20 years of comfortable life on this planet. Yeah yeah the human race will go on, but you and I will probably die of heat exhaustion some time in 204x...

Recycling aluminum is more energy efficient than making new aluminum. At this scale, I can imagine recycling this metal into new bicycles could be more efficient than fixing and distributing old bicycles.

Honestly I wish they had done proper market research before ordering bikes (that cost CO2 to make and distribute). Does any SV company do that any more? I'm guessing not; they see someone offering scooter rentals, they order a few thousand from China, they flood the market. Will it be profitable trying to compete with the others? "Who knows, but hey, we got VC money to burn!".

> Recycling aluminum is more energy efficient than making new aluminum.

But building these bikes didn't magically skip the making part.

I think we will find someway to commit suicide as a species in the next century but I don't think any projection has many people dying of heat exhaustion anywhere rich enough to have AC.

What are the projections on our food supply dying of heat exhaustion?

That's a not a big problem for the farming mega corps. Some of their land will be fine, some of it will get worse and maybe with luck some of it will get better as you go further toward the north. It's a big deal for small farmers in developing countries where all of the land suddenly becomes unusable.

The word "liability" is something they don't want to risk.

Donating 150 bicycles to a school, and due to bad maintenance 10 children have an accident. The bad publicity would be huge. "You donated killer bicycles to our children". Not an easy front page to recover from. Plus the lawsuits etc. The cost of scrapping is worth absorbing much more than risking the above scenario.

Selling: they don't want people to ride their own electric bicycles, they want people to rent for their rides. Selling e.g. 10k bicycles to 10k people, converts potential renters to no-renting-anymore-coz-I-got-my-sweet-ride, whoever bought the business will definitely have 10k less potential customers.

Selling them will also mean that they need to give "some" guarantees about spare parts, maintenance shops, etc.. In Europe when you buy something you automatically have (per EU law) 2 years guarantee. They want to drop that business, not be prisoners of such a deal for the next 2 years. When they sell to a business, the new owner takes up these responsibilities.

Edit: I understand in the USA the guarantee period is 1y. Still a long time, when you want to get rid of something "now" to have to stick with it for one more year. It makes for a bad breakup.

Edit2: typos

Why selling these is so hard? There is a huge market for second hand bikes. I would think you can always get a better price than scrap metal for a functional bike. Any non zero profit is better than zero.

I can't speak for others , but OBike (which they dumped about a thousand over night into a city of 400'000 people) are borderline useless crap.

They actually tried to sell them off after the company folded, but no takers. None!

I tried using one of the schemes in London (ofo I think). After 5mins I got off and walked because they somehow designed a bicycle less efficient than walking

In the US? Liability. Uber has lots of money, so slippin’ jimmy would have a field day

How are ordinary bike companies immune from this kind of lawsuit?

In US liability is everywhere and in everything. With that logic it would be impossible to sell anything (imagine liability associated with a copy of Windows!). I'm not lawyer but I can imagine donating these bikes with clear legal contract with receiver in a state where this won't be issue.

> "Why not at least peel the decals [branding] off and sell the bikes to individuals?" Jon Orcutt of Bike New York, a non-profit group, told news site Motherboard.

> "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement.

> "But given many significant issues - including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment - we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."

Translation: selling the bikes would remove those buyers from our pool of potential renters.

Not really, it'd remove them from the company that bought the newer ones. I suspect liability really is a concern, particularly for scooters full of lithium ion batteries and being charged by Joe Experimenter at home.

All it takes is one person who does something stupid and burns down their house with a used scooter to negate any benefit from selling them. Not because that person would automatically win, but because Uber would have to defend.

Weren't the scooter companies paying random people who signed up to go charge the scooters themselves at their homes? Surely that's far higher liability.

Plus, if this was a concern how on earth is the used car market able to survive? I just don't think liability factors in here at all. My guess is that scrapping them is easier and nets about the same amount of money as selling them. Selling that many scooters off piecemeal would take quite a bit of time & effort, plus costs to store them in the meanwhile.

Scooters yes, e-bikes no. The e-bikes have much bigger batteries. More energy = bigger boom. They also probably only had a fraction of chargers compared to the number of bikes, and sourcing more would probably take a lot of extra time and expense. It would have been better if they could find another bikeshare operator to sell to, but I can understand why they didn't sell to consumers.

If they sell them on the cheap it would kill demand

For a second it looked like a pretty shrub

The future is electric, man. Think about all the coal saved by just burning scooters.