The Shared Bike- Tortured Hero or Villain? (1/?)
— FYI This is Part 1 of a Series —
They appeared overnight. Like an invasion by an alien species in an old movie— we woke up, and they were everywhere. On the lawns in front of our houses, on the curb on our way to work, piled at our beaches and train stations. And as though there was some grand musical-status game being played, every time you looked away and brought your gaze back, they moved again.
These decentralised (no docks) shared bikes are polluting our city (Sydney) — not in emissions, but in bike carcasses. Go about your day, and you will see them hanging off trees, submerged in our ocean, broken to parts on the side of the road, and the list goes on. And as the carcasses pile up, these bikes, be them yellow, orange or red, are finding themselves at the centre of a citywide debate, a debate that is only getting louder by the day (with the latest news being the council impounding many of them).
— Who is to be blamed? The Bikes!? or the People?!
The aim of this piece is to explore both possibilities and offer some possible solutions.
Something Positive to Start With
Before we discuss the issues, let’s just build a case for some of the bikes’ positive impact. I don’t feel that this need much arguing for, but I will make a quick case for it anyway — bikes, in general, are good, very good.
Somewhere amongst the indicators most of us have for city liveability, are bikes and the ease to ride them. Think Vienna, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Melbourne (all high up on our perception of liveability), they are bike havens. Bikes make us active, they bring down emissions, they create a nicer culture, and over-all they just make us feel good. Ever since their invention in the 19th century, humanity has been head over wheels for them. There is a quote that I love, by H.G Wells — “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” — bikes are good, period (American speak for ‘full stop’).
Back to shared bikes — what about them? are they any good? Well, shared bikes are just normal bikes with a little bit more controversy (and a tad more positivity). I have been posting on social media recently asking people about their perception of the bikes, and while many of them were negatives, some positives spins came out as well (so many bike puns).
A Broken Public Transport — In a city with a debatably terrible public transport system (deserving an article piece on its own), the shared bikes are great for late night manoeuvring. When before you would have to get a taxi/Uber or do a hell lot of walking- you can now ride, and pretty much for free.
Accessibility to the Bike World — almost everyone can ride bikes, but many of us, especially in Sydney, do not have one. If you are an adult you might not have one because you can’t care for one yourself, or you left yours in your home city, or maybe if you are still a kid, your parents couldn’t or didn’t want you to have one. Actually, even people who have bikes can enjoy them; rider don’t always have their bikes with them, because it is a lot to carry. With these ones, you can ride somewhere and then leave the bike wherever, something you will never do with your own bike. Be it this reason or another, having bikes available everywhere allows anyone to tap into their goodness, all the time.
And at that, I would argue- bikes are good and shared bikes are good as well. If only they weren’t also so bad…
BLAME THE PEOPLE
Positive or not though, our streets are full of carcasses and its slowly driving us all nuts. Say what you may about the positivity, people like focusing on the negatives, and the conversation sure is focused on why the carcasses keep on pilling up. Let’s start with the perspective that it is the people that are to be blamed.
Blame the Mustache
Asking around about this viewpoint, I got the following response from someone which I think captures it pretty well: “the weirdest part about it for me, is how so many people, especially baby boomers, blame the bikes — Those fucking bikes!”. The person in question was amazed that people were pointing a finger at the bikes and not the people riding them. And to be honest, this was my instinctive reaction as well. Jump with me to another world for a moment — Think gun control, and read the following mantra with me: “guns don’t kill people, people with moustaches kill people”. It is sarcastic, its rhetoric, it is a bit of dark humour; and while in the case of guns it is absolute bullshit, it is kind of the case with bikes. Unlike guns which were designed to kill people, bikes were designed to be bikes — to bring about all the positive points mentioned above.
It is a strange thing, blaming the bikes or the companies that brought them to us when it is the idiots who ride and ruin them that should be blamed. There is nothing ok about vandalising these bikes as they do. It is a felony and it is terrible. Imagine if this was the case with cars or buses or trains. I mean, it often is, in other ways — keyed cars, broken windows, tagged carriages — and when we see it, we get angry. But we get angry at the people who perpetrated the felony, not anyone else.
They Got Us All Wrong
For those who enjoy riding the bikes, this is a classic case of “a few bad apples spoil the bunch”. On the one hand, the community is up in arms against a service they (the people who ride the shared bikes and do not ruin them) like, a service that that may eventually be shut down by the city due to so many complaints (with the council already starting to take a strict move against). On the other hand, for as long as they try and use the bikes, they often encounter an issue, with bikes not appearing where they are supposed to be, or bikes simply being damaged beyond use etc. “This is why we can’t have nice things” I hear people say, frustrated that some of their civil peers are ruining it for everyone. And when they say that, what they probably have in mind is that they wished they lived in a more civilised society.
Let us look elsewhere then, in search of similar situations around the world and compare the results. Take the infamous art festival Burning Man (I’m going to be shunned by the community for calling it a festival). Over there, in the desert, there are heaps of bikes, the most bikes per capita in the world. Most of those are bikes that people bring from home. But in addition to those, the organisation supplies many thousands of bikes as well. These bikes are available for whoever wants to ride them. And in a similar way to the dock-less bikes in Sydney, anyone can pick them up wherever the previous person dropped them, take them for a spin, and so forth. Moreover, at Burning Man, they are all FREE & and they have no locks!; and lo and behold — everyone behaves. If the bikes break, it’s more likely due to the harsh environment, rather than the malice of people — and that is at a semi anarchist festival! How is it that at an anarchist festival it is one way, and at our civilised city it is quite another? Well, that last point about anarchism, if I am to be honest, might be an unfair comment, anyone who has been to Burning Man knows how caring and civil that community is and that people are more likely to go out of their way to repair bikes than to break them. But the point still stands — same concept, different results. The only difference… the people riding them. Ie. all fingers are pointing at the moustache.
I also like the way another friend put it. “[The company behind these bikes] considerably underestimated the larrikinism and social dynamics of the Australian market”. “I can just see the look of bewilderment on the Chinese executives’ faces (most of the shared bike companies in Sydney are Chinese) when they realised- fuck.. we didn’t expect this”. Thinking about things in that way, you kind of have to feel for those companies; they seem to have really not seen it coming. From the outside, Australia looks like a really nice, civilised place.
To conclude, you could make a pretty strong case, that it really is not the bike companies’ fault or the bikes for that matter. There was good intent there, and just bad behaviour on behalf of a few of us rascals.
BLAME THE BIKES
So we have made the case for a tortured hero, good, now let’s break that argument apart, because it is utterly wrong. It is probably a good place for me to reveal that this article isn’t really a well-balanced exploration of both perspectives. Though my initial reaction was to blame the people, I have had some time to think about it and have become a strong believer that the fault behind the bikes, are the bikes themselves. I will herby continue to explore this perspective, let me know if I have managed to change/make your mind.
Product Design 101
In product design land, if your product doesn’t work, it is not the fault of the people using it. It is always, always, the fault of the product itself. A product is designed with a certain context and population in mind. If for some reason your product is not being used in the way you intended, then something, somewhere in your product, is broken. You have probably misunderstood your users or their context in some fundamental way.
Take this famous example from IDEO (US design consultancy). They went to rural India to try and solve for the problem of Women’s loss of time carrying water. Women in villages all across the country were spending a few hours a day carrying water to the village and missing out on educational and job opportunities. To solve for this, they originally used water pipes so to make the walk to the well unnecessary. Soon, however, they found out that the pipes were being cut and damaged. Further research revealed that it was actually the women themselves who were cutting the pipes. The time they spent walking to the wells and back, it turned out, was the only time they had a way from their husbands. The IDEO team realised that their design was faulty and went back to the drawing boards. Our example is not the same as the IDEO example regarding impacting the population negatively and hence they destroy it. But it is the same in the sense of, something is broken in their design and this leads to/allows the damage to happen. IDEO, by the way ended up solving the problem in a very different way, but that is a whole other story.
Now let’s get a little more theoretical — according to the now popular Lean Startup school of thought for product and business design — your product is not just your product. As in, your product is not just the physical/digital thing you have built. The product is the entirety of it, the business model, the user experience, the sales channels, the whole eco-system around it. Everything together makes the product, and while the product itself might be beautiful and functional, there may be something innate in the experience/context in which it is used, that ‘breaks’ the way it was intended to be used, be it big or small.
In our context, this ‘break’ results in the bike carcasses. Is the ‘break’, unique to the Shared Bike industry? Not really. According to thought leaders in the space of product and business design, no product survives the first interaction with its users. Something is always going to break. Why? because it is extremely hard to simulate everything that will happen and every way that users may interact with it. Real good product designers notice where their product breaks and then adapt the product accordingly. Failing to do so, well, that is a failure on behalf of Team Bike, and that is where we should start pointing our finger at.
Not yet convinced? What if we consider that we are not alone? Pretty much every city that the shared bikes have arrived at experienced a version of this carcasses issue. It varies from place to place due to their unique context, but the result is usually the same, the community gets pissed off by the rising tide of bike pollution everywhere. In China, it is in larger numbers, in Australia we are more creative in the way we destroy it, but it is the same issue. Sure we can blame the people riding the bikes, but if you zoom out and see that our symptoms are part of a bigger context, and if you follow the product design world principles, then you better start thinking that something, somewhere in the decentralised bike sharing scheme — is broken.
Pointing at the Break
“Ok, I have read so far… so what is it? Where does it break?” I hear you say.
And the answer is none other than — this piece got too long.
I started writing with the intent of covering it all at the one place and then realised I must break it into two separate pieces.
If you have read till here and still keen to find out my thoughts on the what is the actual problem with the bikes (and how we could solve it)— please keep reading, I have written a second (and a third) piece to go through that in detail and you could read it here
If you have had enough and are just content that you can now point a finger at the bike companies with a clear conscious, knowing that they failed on some product design level — I am pretty happy with that result too.
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