On the space-starved streets of Tokyo, every bit of spare square footage counts, making the city’s investment in underground bike parking system, a complex-seeming solution, a sensible way to tackle bike storage and theft, reducing overcrowding and illegal parking on sidewalks.
Japan designed and built the Parking System before the Sharing economy widely apply in Sharing Bikes industry.
How Japan underground bicycle parking system works?
The whole systems are composed of docking stations and underground auto-storage systems. The body, smart card reader, bike holder and storage occupation display consist of the docking stations, while the cylindrical shaft，carrier lifts and storage equipment consist of the auto-storage systems. The cylindrical shaft is the place of mechanically operated carrier lifts delivering the bikes to rotate downwards.
Users’ stored operations are easy and the retrial process takes about only 8 seconds.
An IC tag mounted on the front wheel corresponds to the user’s membership card. Users simply walk their bike up, input a card or code, and let the machinery do the rest.
To get a bike out, one swipes their IC card, and the automated system retrieves the bike and places it above-ground in about 8 seconds, ideal and efficient for peak, and rush hour times，much faster than a valet.
The Bike’s parking systems are giving more surface space to the citizens and protecting the vehicles.
These bicycle parks work on the concept of taking things that take up space and moving them underground, giving the citizens more space to use up on the surface. One machine can hold as many as 200 bikes as far.
Besides，the bicycle is quickly rotated and put away safely. It also means that the bicycles are safe from the weather and pranksters.
The whole systems are easily built and saving the use rate of the precious land resource.
Chinese roads are in chaos for nuisance parking of the sharing bicycles.
As Chinese bike-sharing boom, lots of headache related are emerging in Chinese cities. Users can rent the bicycles cheaply on a smartphone and park the bikes anywhere they want. Jumbled piles of bikes are dumped outside subway stations and other popular areas.
Those parked bicycles would spoil surrounding sight and bother ambulance access and fire-fighting operations.
Competition in the domestic market is getting fiercer，some companies are out.
In 2017，the sharing bike industry in China underwent lots ups and downs. In October 25th, the first merger got under way between Youon and Hellobike. In June, a Chinese bike share firm, Wukong Bike, went bust after losing 90% of bikes,while OFO and Mobike got large funds in a new round. After the fierce competition, lots of small companies are on the way out of the market, resulting to a terrible recycle problem for the society.
The reasons for nuisance parking including competitive bicycle delivery, urban road planning defect and bad using behavior.
Competitive bicycle delivery takes the early main responsibility. There are 70-plus bike-sharing companies entered the rapidly expanding market, and more than 16 million vehicles were delivered, serving for more than 1.5 billion people. The number of registered users is more than 130 million. However，there are more than 32,000,000 sharing-bicycle users up to 2017 Q2. The chain growth is slowing down.
The dockless bike market in all of the first-tier and part of the second-tier cities are saturated. More than 9 cities are in the list saying no to new shared bikes, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and so on. Although the delivery is low compared to the population of the city，the total number of cars on road is already huge，not enough room for the traffic vehicle competition. All the virus bike-launching makes the traffic congestion a worse situation.
For the fast development of urbanization，the defect of the urban road planning also appear. The cities are designed for the cars than bicycles, lacking bicycle lane and convenient bicycle parking lot. Illegal parking, vandalism and traffic violations are rife in cities.
For the users, bad using behavior also intensified the situation. They are not required to park the bicycle to docking stations, and just leave the bicycle for their own convenience. Poor regulation creates mayhem on the country’s roads.
The real meaning of sharing economy is to enhance the social productivity but not a new environmental problem.
The term “collaborative consumption”, which described the prototype of sharing economy, was first coined by Marcus Felson and Joe L. Spaeth in their paper “Community Structure and Collaborative Consumption: A routine activity approach” published in 1978 in the American Behavioral Scientist.
The inner definition of sharing economy is encouraging people to create value out of shared and open resources in ways that balance personal self-interest with the good of the larger community. The core of sharing economy is to enhance the efficiencies of resource and provide a new thinking way of consumptions.
It’s sad that the sharing bike in China is wasting more resource such as cities’ road resource，landing resource, manufacturing resource, environmental resource and so on. This kind of sharing economy development runs counter to the real core of sharing economy.
Launching underground bicycle parking systems to solve the problems is advisable.
The issue should be considered as a social problem. Compared to Japan, a country of bicycle widely used without chaos for the ground，launching underground bicycle parking systems to solve the problems is highly considerable.
The bike-sharing startups and government or other organization can work together to make a better city, avoiding the waste of city resource and ending up the situation of physical movement of the bikes.
