World’s largest dockless bike company, Ofo, launches in Sydney
A Chinese company is set to launch its dockless bike-sharing service in Sydney, Australia, joining three similar companies which already operate in the city. Ofo, which was founded in Beijing in 2014, will put a total of 600 bikes into different areas over the coming weeks, and has pledged to act in a "more responsible" way than some other providers. The dockless schemes have grown in recent months, with 60,000 people in Sydney downloading bike sharing apps on their smartphones, and around 4,000 bikes already operated by companies Reddy Go, oBike and Airbike.

The world’s largest dockless bike company will launch in Sydney on Wednesday, joining three other companies and 4,000 bikes competing for the business of the city’s 600,000 daily visitors.



Ofo, a Beijing-based company founded at Peking University by graduate student Dai Wei in 2014, will release 200 bikes in the City of Sydney on Wednesday, followed by 200 bikes in Waverley Council, which includes Bondi, a week later, and another 200 bikes in the inner west a week after that.

The company, recognised as the first dockless bikeshare company in the word, operates 10 million bikes in 180 cities worldwide and plans to expand to 20 countries by the end of 2017.

Its Australian expansion comes as councils in both Sydney and Melbourne crack down on bikesharing companies, with Melbourne’s lord mayor Robert Doyle describing them as “urban clutter”.



Dockless bikeshare schemes work by getting people to download an application on their phone, which allows them to subscribe to the service, locate and unlock nearby bikes, and pay for their use.

Since the first scheme began operating in Sydney three months ago, more than 60,000 people have downloaded a bikeshare app and the City of Sydney has received 29 complaints.

Ofo has promised a “more responsible” launch than other providers, with a local operations team to retrieve wayward bicycles, a geofence built into the app that penalises users who take the bikes outside of a proscribed location, and helmets locked to the back of the bike.

They company is also prepared to prosecute people who vandalise its bikes, said Scott Walker, the Australian head of strategy. He compared vandalism of dockless bikes, which has been rampant since the first scheme launched in Australia earlier this year, to keying someone’s car.

“What people are doing is they are vandalising a service that is there to make their life easier, make their commute better,” Walker told Guardian Australia.

Ofo launched in Adelaide with 50 bikes earlier this month, and recently added another 50. It had three local operations staff to collect the bikes and return them to its preferred parking zones, which are marked in the app.

“Bikeshare is a resource-intensive model, you need a lot of staff on the ground to properly manage a fleet of outdoor bicycles that are dockless,” Walker said. “If people see bikes not being used or they see bikes stationary for a long period of time, or a bike fallen over, or vandalised, and not being repaired or moved, then they don’t see the scheme as organised or valuable.”

Sydney already has more than 4,000 dockless bikes, operated by Reddy Go, oBike and Airbike.

Singapore-based oBike also operates in Melbourne, and recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the City of Melbourne acknowledging that council had the right to impound bikes that had been inappropriately parked, were damaged, or were cluttering an area, and could destroy those bikes if the company didn’t claim them within 14 days.

Thirty oBikes have been destroyed by the City of Melbourne since 1 July and more than 50 have been fished out of the Yarra river, after being dumped there by users.

Others have been left up trees. In Sydney, oBike Australian marketing director Chethan Rangaswamy told the Australian Financial Review bikes are usually left at the bottom of a hill near the beach, where they have to be fetched each night and trucked up to a train station ready for the next day’s riders.

The City of Sydney said it had not seen Ofo’s list of preferred parking spaces, but said it was generally welcoming of “the concept of” dockless ride bike schemes.

“While we support the concept of bikeshare, we continue to stress our concerns about safety, redistribution of bikes and accessibility on footpaths, and have found operators to be responsive to public queries and complaints,” a spokesman said.

The New South Wales transport department is developing a management policy for dockless bikeshare schemes at the request of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore.