Sick of tripping over abandoned share bikes on city streets? Tired of stumbling across them in the beautiful areas of your city, dumped by thoughtless tourists? Fed up with what an eyesore they are?

According to a bizarre piece from Fairfax spruiking the share bike industry, however, the problem is you and your “car-centric attitude”, not the bikes. In fact the bikes are “colourful fleets” and the victims of “moral panic”, according to a “Sydney-based transport policy expert” which the piece heavily relies on (the “expert” goes under a pseudonym “due to political sensitivities” or, perhaps, because people will think they’re a dickhead). The journalist goes out of his way to insist that there’s nothing sinister about bike-sharing and that the mainly Chinese companies involved absolutely have no intention of exploiting the rich trove of data they gather from users.

Because, as we now know so well courtesy of Facebook, we should believe tech companies when they hand on heart insist they’re not exploiting us.

Despite the claim that share bikes are absolutely not about datasharing, the piece takes us on an exciting voyage into the future of transport, in which no tech cliche, apparently, will be unused: mobility as a service (MaaS), on-demand, last mile, single interface, mainstreamed into the digital economy, app-based model, bundling. And, inevitably — oh, so inevitably — the internet of things: “central hubs connecting riders to net-based resources via the Internet of Things (IoT*) and creating a data-driven ecosystem.” If only there was an app to monetise taking cliches for a ride.

Before we take our little yellow bikes for a spin in the data-driven ecosystem and dump them at a particularly lovely spot — say, overlooking the cliff where the last straggly vegetation of our privacy is relentlessly smashed by corporate greed — let’s reflect for a moment on an issue that, for all that the Fairfax piece purports to examine the economics of the industry, is curiously missing from it.

What passes for the business model for dockless share bikes — which we’re told basically only make money from ride fees — relies heavily on negative externalities. The externality is the mass dumping of bikes in Australian cities imposing visual pollution, hazards for pedestrians and clean-up costs for local councils that have to collect the things. This externality is a crucial competitive advantage over other share bike business models that rely on docks — infrastructure that requires investment and planning approval by authorities and which can be effectively integrated into existing transport networks.

In effect, foreign companies have dumped large amounts of garbage in major Australian cities, imposing costs on the community that proper bike-sharing schemes have to incorporate into their business model.

In the absence of meaningful moves by governments to force these companies to absorb the negative externalities they’re imposing on us, the only effective response is for the community to deter the companies from doing so. Rendering the bikes unusable — and thus removing the primary revenue stream — would signal to the companies that they have to stop imposing that externality on the rest of us, and compete on fair terms with dock-based share bike operations. Indeed, arguably it is economically and morally appropriate to do so, especially when dockless bikes can be disabled without permanently damaging them.

Then tourists, Fairfax journalists and pseudonymous transport experts can tool around the data-driven ecosystem to their hearts’ content.

* a common mispelling — in fact the correct term is Internet of Shit.

What do you think of share bikes and their vandal-prone rollout? Send us your comments and letters to boss@crikey.com.au.