Signal 2: One Possible Solution to Beijing Traffic Jam: Bike-Sharing
Encouraging more people use public transit system instead of driving cars is a welcome and high-efficiency solution to traffic jam. Furthermore, encouraging them choose bicycle as their trip model will benefit health, environment and efficiency.
Last year, the bike-sharing system in Beijing underwent a significant revolution: the dockless bikes took off and gradually replaced automated docking station bicycles. This revolution of bike-sharing gives a huge push to the development of bike-sharing. Dozens of bike-share companies raised and quickly flooding city streets with millions of shared bikes. According to Davis Wang (the CEO of one top popular sharing-bikes company Mobike), Mobike serves 4 million people a day in Beijing. The rapidly growing user volume is due to the very convenience of bike-sharing: the users can locate, unlock and pay for the shared-bikes on their phones then park the bike anywhere.
In Beijing, the reducing traffic effects of sharing-bikes are salient: short-distance driving declined from 57.1% to 34.7% and 60% of the roads around subway stations experienced an improvement.
However, the oversupply of sharing-bikes caused problems. Hundreds of bicycles pile up and block pathways. Besides, the abandoned bikes are a huge waste of resources. Fortunately, the companies are setting about to deal with these side-effects by managing users to park bikes normally and other future solutions.
