Think of your favorite cities in the world. I know nothing about you, but I’ll make a bet: All of them were built well over a century ago, before the rise of the automobile.
Statistically, that bet is a clear loser: Most of the cities in the world are a few decades old, at most. In 1950, just 83 cities had more than 1 million inhabitants; by 2008, that number had risen to more than 400. That means that the overwhelming majority came of age in the last half-century or so. But post-car cities are invariably broken on some fundamental level. They’re architected around vehicles, not people, and feel inhuman as a result. Cars, after all, require acres of flat, open space to operate effectively, both when moving and when parked. The result is cities that are all but unnavigable to anybody without wheels.
Cars inflict an awful toll in terms of public health, too: millions of deaths and injuries due to crashes, as well as elevated levels of particulate pollution and a strong incentive for citizens to sit down too much and self-propel around the city too little. Once cars have taken over, humans become small, weak, scared, helpless, infantilized.
The question then becomes: Are cities doomed to be forever tainted by the original sin of their birthdate? Will all cities built around cars feel grim and soulless for generations to come? Or, like the complex emergent organisms they are, can they evolve into human-scaled places with real soul and a sense of place?
Up until now, the prognosis has been pretty grim. City planners who have tackled the problem have invariably failed. (Look, for instance, at Los Angeles' Tom Bradley, whose 1973 mayoral campaign included the promise to build a new rail line. More than four decades later, LA remains a stubbornly car-based city, with a mere 100 miles or so of rail.) Planning tends to defeat—or at least fail to replicate—the kind of subtle and complex interactions that create a rich urban fabric. Plus, those planners are up against basic math. Vibrant cities require density, and if you have enough people per square mile to make a city hum, you also have enough people per square mile to cause horrendous traffic congestion.
Where city planners have failed, however, rampaging Chinese capitalists might have succeeded. Two huge Chinese companies, Mobike and Ofo, have started to transform Beijing, Shanghai, and most other major Chinese cities; they’ve already made inroads in much of the rest of the world too. So far they’re still tiny in America, but they’re very well funded, and the Chinese precedent is proof that growth can be truly explosive if the local government is willing to let it happen.
The transformation mechanism is dockless bike share, a fundamentally simple idea that was simply not possible before the age of the ubiquitous smartphone. Start with millions of bikes, equip them all with GPS trackers and digital locks, and drop them on the city of your choice. Then, leave everything to the citizenry. Anybody can download the app, use it to unlock a bike near them, ride it wherever they want, and then leave it at their destination. Each ride, in China at least, costs the rider no more than about 15 cents.
The bikes then start taking on a life of their own, as they get swept up in the invisible streams and eddies of human movement around the city. It’s messy and chaotic, to be sure—but it’s also incredibly effective and insanely popular. So popular, indeed, that before long, cars find themselves having to navigate their way around bikes, rather than the other way around. For the first time in living memory, cars have lost their primacy. And they’re losing it fast: In Shanghai, the number of dockless bikes exploded from an already-enormous 450,000 to a mind-boggling 1.5 million in the six months from February to August 2017.
Dockless bikes are so transformative because they solve the single biggest problem in post-car cities: short trips inside the city center. Most cities already have train systems that can move millions of people every day across long distances. But until now there has been no such option for shorter trips once they get downtown, or for people wanting to get to train and subway stations in the first place. In younger cities, those shorter trips tend to involve long, grim walks down car-choked highways. But if you have access to a bike any time you want one, an intimidating half-mile-long block becomes an easy hop. Most bike-share journeys replace unattractive walks, and make urban navigation much more pleasurable as a result.
Bikes plus smartphones, then, might just be enough to usher in a new golden age for cities.
This golden age will certainly be unpleasant for some—and not only for drivers newly surrounded by wobbly bicyclists. When cities have little control over companies that are dropping millions of bikes on a city, and when those companies have little control over where those bikes end up, the results can be ugly. All over China, there are stories of bikes blocking traffic, bikes obstructing pedestrian sidewalks, bikes stolen or abandoned or stripped for parts. In the most viral demonstration of dockless bikes’ negative social utility, photos abound of piles of tens of thousands of discards, clogging up landfills and transporting nobody anywhere. It’s easy to see why Western cities like Paris and New York prefer the order of a dock-based system, where all trips begin and end at one of a small number of strictly controlled locations. Dock-based bike share systems fit neatly into the existing urban microgrid: They’re polite guests on someone else’s turf. Dockless bike share, by contrast, is chaotic.
But only the chaos of dockless bike share has the potential to remap a formerly car-dominated city by dint of the sheer volume of bikes and people. Dockless bikes also reveal a town’s true civic nature: In polite societies they are parked conscientiously, with full regard to both cars and pedestrians, while in more sharp-elbowed societies they assert their place more aggressively.
Either way, dockless bikes and their users enjoy enough freedom, and create enough disruption, to reveal desire paths, build new ones, and make permanent changes to the warp and weft of the city.
What’s more, the bike riders aren’t on their own. One of the reasons that city planners often get things wrong is that they can’t easily read the minds and desires of millions of urban inhabitants. With data from dockless bike share companies, however, they can begin to do exactly that. (And, in fact, the bike share companies generally consider themselves to be in the data business at least as much as they’re in the bike business.) By biking certain routes at certain times, bikers are showing the city exactly what kind of infrastructure is both needed and desired, which makes providing that infrastructure vastly easier.
Large-scale urban changes, then, are for the first time being made in the most democratic and human-scaled way imaginable. The driving force is not urban planners or all-powerful property developers; rather, it’s thousands of people on bikes, each making individual, idiosyncratic decisions.
Dockless bikes provide the perfect tool for navigating wide avenues while still feeling connected to the city; their riders are able to hop off and interact with life on the street for any or no reason, any time they like. By getting where they want to go in the easiest and most efficient manner possible, dockless bike riders are effortlessly demonstrating—and creating—exactly what their city needs. Move over, city planners: A few million bicyclists are going to have the kind of impact you can only dream of.
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Photograph by WIRED/Tim Graham/Getty Images
