The landscape of Melbourne and Sydney is literally littered with oBikes.
The bike-share service, which has found huge success in Singapore, uses a “dockless” locking function that means the bikes can be left anywhere convenient for riders: footpaths, rooftops, at the bottom of rivers and even within local artworks.
However Australia’s failure to use a bike-share product in good faith is not necessarily due to the country being home to a pack of ungrateful animals — at least, not entirely. According to behavioural economist Brendan Markey-Towler, it’s because the service has not translated well into an Australian context.
“The big problem with engineering any sort of change here is obtaining a state of what we call ‘substitutability’,” he told Crikey.
“That is, taking a current course of action and substituting it for a new course of action to achieve a roughly equivalent outcome. In this case, it’s ‘can I get from A to B as easily with these new technologies like oBikes?’.”
He says the series of adjustments Australians must make to ditch the car in favour of a bike outnumber the amount Singaporeans would have to make.
“In Australia you’ve got to commute from the suburbs into the CBD and back out again and those distances are large,” Markey-Towler said.
“You can’t do that on a city council bike and you can’t really do that on an oBike. You’ve got to have a proper road bike.”
Markey-Towler suggests that a big problem in Australia is the country’s helmet laws. A recent study found helmet laws, which don’t exist in Singapore, are a deterrent for certain people who would otherwise choose to ride a bike.
It has also been argued Australia’s lack of bike-friendly infrastructure further discourages potential commuter-cyclists.
So why do they get dumped everywhere? Markey-Towler says it comes back to geography.
“Singapore is such a dense city. There’s always going to be a place where there’s someone who wants to pick [an oBike] up,” he said. “That’s not necessarily the case in Australia where the oBike is something you might do [only] if you really need to.”
But Markey-Towler says the delinquent treatment of the bikes is a response to the ill-considered entry to the Australian market, and an expression of Australia’s disdain for anything impractical.
“It’s not so much that we’re idiots or anti-environmental. It’s that our lives are desperately practical and we’re trying the best we can to make sense of our lives and form a lifestyle that allows us to deal with an unbelievably complex world.”
There is, however, an “impish aspect of Australian culture” at play. Consider another product of wildly stupid collective behaviour: Ferry McFerryface, the official name for a Sydney Harbour ferry, as voted for online by the Australian public.
“What you’re seeing with Ferry McFerryface … is something that’s not quite practical and doesn’t really matter for us and we use as an opportunity to joke.”
This could explain our reaction to The Guardian Australia’s recent Australian Bird of the Year competition, in which readers have been invited to vote for their favourite native bird? Debate has been fierce, and a typically mischievous campaign on social media has pushed for the ibis (or “bin chicken“) to earn top spot.
But it could also shed some light on the one time Australian cynicism seemed to allow it to keep it’s nice things — in this case, local cafe culture.
Despite Starbucks’ domination of cafe markets across the world, it hasn’t been able to efficiently crack Australia without suffering resounding losses. In 2013, the coffee chain closed 60 of its 80 stores, the remainder of which it sold to the Whithers group. Why? We love our local cafes enough that it overcame the “substitutability” that Starbucks offered.
Markey-Towler says the corporation underestimated the strong relationships local businesses are able to establish with customers.
“It’s really hard for a big establishment to come in and break that because you’re fighting against some of the most poignant and powerful psychological processes in human beings, which is community.”
One of the reasons why oBike works well in Singapore is that because bikes are banned from the metro system there (other than folding bikes folded to below a certain size).
However, even though helmets law are non-existent in Singapore, roads aren’t as friendly and there is hardly any on-road bike lanes to speak of. Bicycles are encouraged to be used on pavements, and there are well-connected bikeways provided spanning the city-state.
Is Australia the only country in the world with compulsory helmet laws? I live in an east coast holiday town where the vast majority of tourists and locals don’t wear helmets. Even the council website shows people without helmets, yet every now and again the police have blitzes and fine riders. The local paper reported the story of a holidayer have been fined over $300. Surely its time to repeal these useless laws.
I am a regular cyclist and encourage riding but I object very strongly to this abuse of public space. The so called dockless bikes are yet another example of the corporate world privatising gains and socialising losses.
Public spaces are invaluable and have to be protected, the owners of the bikes are using these spaces as free parking, no matter how inconvenient or dangerous the bike is. If these bikes were kept in bays that were maintained by the owners of the bikes, not on public lands (footpaths, nature strips, parks etc) then no problems: go for it.
You forget the benefit to all of less cars. Anyway, what is this obsession with everything having a price when so very little is valued?
All if you ignore additional pedestrian congestion on footpaths, uninsured pedestrian danger, and commercial clutter dumped everywhere. And that’s assuming these rubbish quality bikes are usable in hilly inner Sydney. And not everyone drives a car.
That’s forgetting all those cars taking up a huge amount of (public) space at the kerb, often illegally. Surely a few obikes are insignificant, talk about not seeing the woods for the trees. Councils should provide bike parking spots on the road like the ones near Sydenham Station in Sydney.
So true. Because we’ve all grown up with cars, we’re blind to the sacrifices made for the sake of their convenience. The filth they spew, the noise pollution, the danger they pose, the lives they destroy and all the public space they consume both when in motion and stationary. As their capacity to provide diminishes (circling, trying to find a park, giving up and driving on.. going nowhere in grid-locked traffic..) do their drawbacks come to the fore? Bicycles are superior in most respects: no noise pollution, no air pollution, they regularly deliver you to your destination much faster than a car can in traffic or even public transport with connections, while keeping you fit, and they take up far less space. Those for whom the O bike is a blight should turn their head and face the torrent of screaming metal just off the curb. What horror is that!?
Delinquent damage to another’s property (however ‘anonymous’ the owner, somebody does own the bikes) is vandalism, not a deeply, well considered sociological statement.
Melbourne is flat as a tack, laid out on a grid system, Amsterdam is even flatter and laid out in arcs, Sydney is a warren, hilly, congested and dangerous for bike riders due to lack of protected bike lanes.
Simples.
Yes, but only a few short years until battery assisted bikes become the norm, so we still need to sort this out, also the helmet thing.