Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of e-bikes were photographed piling up in what has been unofficially dubbed, ‘China’s e-bike graveyard’. It has been going on for years, with no end in sight.

Brings a new perspective to the size of China's massive bike graveyards pic.twitter.com/Enji5nmYtE

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) December 4, 2018

Despite all the green hype surrounding the ‘dockless bike-share’ industry, it is producing an extraordinary amount of waste. Like wind turbine blades, these e-bikes are congregating in Xiamen and Shenyang, among other places, where they are largely left to rot in a sea of metal and rubber.

In some cases, these fields of bikes are several stories high, reshaping the landscape with the failed dreams of green urban enthusiasts. Not only are bikes dumped because they are damaged, some of China’s largest e-bike companies have collapsed. Many more are confiscated by government authorities. It is a disaster.

Even when the bikes are used as intended, they have created a major problem for already squeezed urban spaces. Residents have complained that bike-sharing has left their cities cluttered and a mess, with bikes discarded in the middle of footpaths, in hedges, rivers, parks – anywhere the careless user chooses.

Because bike-shares follow the old socialist principle of ‘people will take care of communal property’, it naturally fails in most places – with China’s problem of mistreated share-bikes repeated in America, Australia, and Europe. The largest measure for the success of a bike-share company appears to be the strict social order of society. Effectively, it operates on trust.

E-bike sharing is another one of those lovey-dovey Utopian ideas that woefully overlooks human behaviour. Just as public housing built on the taxpayer dollar is frequently neglected and destroyed, share-bikes are abused and abandoned because there is no significant punishment for the user. They didn’t buy it and they have no emotional attachment to it.

The globalist philosophy of ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ would likely turn the whole world into a slum. People don’t look after things if they can’t own them. We’re a nesting species, not squatters.

In 2020, there were over 10 million e-bikes in operation in China with the market continuing to grow despite teething problems. Where will they end up? In landfill? In the sea? Leaching into the dirt? In China, particularly, there are millions of early-model e-bikes with lead-acid batteries residing in these graveyards. They will be joined by the newer lithium-ion batteries. None of this is zero emission in the sense that the public expect.

‘Cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen subsequently tightened up policies on bike-share operators to better manage the chaotic environments the oversupply and unregulated bikes have created,’ said the ITDP.

While making cities more ‘bike friendly’ might help the immediate safety requirements, we know from some European countries, which are already well adapted for bikes, that it does not solve the larger issue of customer use.

E-bike sharing in Australia is annoying. If you walk towards Broadway in Sydney, the chances are you’ll trip over one collapsed and abandoned in the middle of the footpath. Sometimes they are left on the road. They all have helmets hanging off the handlebar so you can put your head in the same spot as a hundred other strangers. This is an odd behaviour for the Covid hypochondriacs who still wear masks and overdose on hand sanitiser. They refuse to sit on trains or touch escalator handrails, but shared helmets? That doesn’t count. Woke maths.

Australia’s e-bikes have a history of being thrown into rivers and left in parks. Depressing photos surfaced in 2017 of a barge with a couple of blokes pulling dozens out of the Yarra River in Melbourne. E-bike companies are doing their best to combat poor customer behaviour, but they are like parents trying to get a TikToker to clean their room.

Why do people panicky about the end of the world go to the trouble of using an e-bike only to chuck it in the water?

I’ve seen shared bikes work. In a regional seaside town, old-school bikes are left neatly locked into position beside a major shopping centre right beside the bike tracks. They are unlocked via an app which is relatively cheap to use. If the bikes aren’t back in their little homes within 24 hours, the user is automatically charged the full cost of the bike. Weirdly, this threat sees all the bikes returned without a scratch.

Brisbane has also had some luck with e-bike sharing for two main reasons: the city is very hard to navigate for newbies (and Google Maps has no idea how to help), and there are some scenic purpose-built bike-ways that suit the ‘drop in, drop off’ model.

Riding in Sydney or Melbourne is more like an extreme sport where some bike lanes end on freeway ramps or tram tracks while others channel riders into death traps like lemmings to a cliff.

The dream of shared e-bikes is not evil, and I’m sure plenty of green advocates have an Eden-esque result in mind. What we have to be careful of is that we don’t choke the world with e-waste while trying to ‘save it’.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in