Hey everyone! I’ll start these newsletters with a quick personal update and the recurring series “Stuff I’ve Talked About in Chinese Class”, and then a few thoughts on stuff I’ve observed you’ll hopefully find interesting. This week will be on bikeshares.
What’s up with me
I was in Beijing for two weeks taking Mandarin lessons, wandering around listening to audiobooks and spending too much time in malls to avoid 100-degree weather. On Monday I arrived in Guilin, a city in the south surrounded by mountains, for two months of intensive language study. When I told Chinese people in Beijing I was going to Guilin, I got two responses: 1. wow it’s beautiful there, and 2. don’t they have lots of AIDS?
Stuff I’ve Talked About in Chinese Class
US Culture: Why Christian Chenoweth wanted to help make the witch popular in Wicked. Why Chris Christie was at the beach. Jay Z’s new album and why OJ thought he wasn’t black (don’t think I explained that one well). The history of MSG in the US. Why Trump doesn’t drink alcohol. Why Kim K is famous. The concept of “foot-long” food. “Free 99.”
Chinese Culture: An androgynous all-female Chinese ‘boy band’. How it’s hard to find a good Chinese way to say ‘Schneider’ because I have a hard time distinguishing my pronunciation between ‘shi’ and ‘si’ and in Chinese ‘si’ it sounds like I’m saying ‘death.’ Why my teacher was surprised I knew which American writers were alcoholics (because apparently in school they don’t teach their kids about famous people’s flaws). Why I’m not married.
Chinese word of the week: 酒鬼, or the two characters for alcoholic beverage and ghost, is a drunkard.
Bikeshares
Once you get your Chinese bank account and payment systems set up, you gain access to the best innovation of the Chinese app ecosystem I’ve encountered: dockless bike shares. By scanning a QR code you can unlock one of the hundreds of thousands of bikes parked randomly around different cities. After you ride (for 15 cents an hour) you can lock the bike right at your destination.
If you’ve only used the docking bike shares of NY and DC, it’s hard to grasp how big a lifestyle change this brings. On my commute in DC, I knew that if I woke up around 7:15 there would usually be a bike at the closest dock that I could usually park near my office. But the unreliability of the bikes’ availability coupled with the need to walk five minutes before you unlock and five minutes after you park made the service less useful. Also, by the time you got to your destination the most convenient dock may have filled up.
The experience with Ofo and Mobike is totally different. You’re always within ten yards of a bike and can lock them anywhere. Because of their convenience, they fundamentally change how you interact with the city.
After winning the civil war, Mao decided that Beijing shouldn’t be preserved as a museum of ancient culture but rather turned from a “consumption city” to a “production city.” From his Tiennamen balcony, he hoped to see an “ocean of smokestacks.” In the following decades, the PRC flattened thousand-year-old houses and in their place built giant ring roads with blocks too long to be walkable. After the urban redevelopment made bikes necessary, crime became a problem. Ofo’s founders created their company because they were sick of getting relying on bikes that kept getting stolen.
These bike shares have changed how you can experience Beijing. The city already has a strong subway and bus network. Layering on bikes, you can cut out your two-stop subway rides and turn the fifteen-minute walks from the subway to your destination into a four-minute bike ride.
As for safety, Beijing has reasonably strong bike infrastructure and the sheer number of bikers gives the streets an “emergent order.” But unlike in the US, electric scooters don’t share the road with cars but rather drive in bike lanes, so you have to focus on biking straight because they often buzz past you going 25-30mph
The more obvious first-order impacts are on health, pollution, and traffic congestion. But plenty more happens when you introduce a new mode of transportation. These bikes shrink the world around you, expanding the radius you’re willing to travel to see friends and do activities. If enough people use Yelp-equivalents, maybe this will spill over to improving the quality of stores and restaurants, as they’ll now have to compete with a wider radius of similar businesses. To really get Tyler Cowen on you, I could also see bikeshares helpingcombat 21st-century tech-enabled youth isolation (bikes make it marginally easier to meet up with friends who might live a little further away).
There must be plenty more societal impacts this Mobike White Paper alludes to I don’t know enough about China to tease out. For instance, old people take the longest rides and bike the fastest, and bike rideshares are much more popular with male than female college students.
Most strangely, though, you start to perceive motion differently. Once you start to you do almost all your movement by bike, walking down the street starts to feel like living life in half-speed. I began to understand why suburban people would drive their car 50 yards to the next store in the strip mall because walking just started to feel wrong.
One analogy that captures some of the impacts is the first few days of Pokemon Go. That app for a short while found a way to get people exercising more and see their surroundings differently. Bikeshares can do the same in a much more fundamental and lasting way. I’ll talk more about whether I think this is viable in the states in a future email, but I sure hope it is.
And after some aggressive linkedin-ing, it looks like I’ll be interning at Ofo’s global expansion team come this fall! So, more to come from this story.
Airbnbs
They seem pretty illegal…
Thanks for making it this far!
Future topics: young women playing what in the west we’d describe as ‘hardcore’ mobile games (in particular there’s a League of Legends clone that’s #1 in the app store), Trump in China, food pricing, bro lifting culture, mall life, fashion, me and my badminton coach who goes to a ‘Sports University’ where her degree is in badminton.