New e-parking lots for share bikes

We all agree that share bikes made our life much more convenient but as you can see every day that a pile of share bikes took up the space of the pavement which just leave a tiny aisle for us to walk.

Start from 18th July, there’s a new e-parking lot (also called as “electronic fence”) to park the share bike in Dongcheng and Chongwen districts. Around 37 areas are set for the numbers 3700 of share bikes to park.

Chongwen and Dongcheng districts are the largest two areas for using share bikes. Around 3000 of share bikes are parking here during daily peak time. Now, these two districts are cooperating with ofo bike and mobike to set up the electronic parking lots.

Mobike set up an intelligent device at each e-parking lot to track that if the user did park in the right place. And for ofo bike cooperated with an IT company to use the satellites to mark out the areas that define as an e-parking lot. When you are ready to park your bike, on the app you will see a place that marked in blue which shown as “recommended place to park”. All you have to do is place the bike in that area and after you’ve locked the bike, you’ll get two credits and coupons as the reward. This GPS satellite can be limited to 5 meters.

GPS device of ofo bike

If the e-parking lots run well in these two districts, it will be set up in whole Beijing and if the user didn’t park the bike in the assigned place, there will be a punishment such as deduct the credits or will be continued to be charged.

But it seems that not everyone supports this new policy. In light of this recent news, Beijing residents are angered by the new regulations, reasoning the new rules will do away with the convenience that makes bike-sharing such a positive service in the first place. Some held the opinion of share bicycles have lost their reason for existing which one of the selling points is “You can use and park wherever you want.”

With this tiny space to park, a new question came up. “How do you expect me to park a bike in a space so small? Should I just stack them on top?” or “So if my share bike breaks on the way to a destination, I should just carry it home on my back?”

One gave this solution: “It’s too tiring to stack them, so the best course of action is to push somebody else’s bike out of the designated space so you can push yours in.”

Use of share bikes have become so overwhelmingly popular in Beijing that they often occupy a sizable portion of sidewalk space, leading one user to ask, “So what if it’s full?”

And yet, share bikes have their supporters, too. We will soon find out how does e-parking lots work and hopefully, this does will solve the problems of the disorganized parking situation.