IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/transa/v140y2020icp72-80.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

O Bike in Melbourne: A plea for more scepticism about disruption and capital, based on what we can know about one dockless bike scheme

Author

Listed:
  • Chambers, Peter

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to a critical dialogue on disruption and the sharing economy by reflecting critically on O Bike’s appearance and disappearance in Melbourne, Australia. Recalling the credulousness that attended the arrival of O Bike’s fleet between June 2017 and 2018, this paper gives primacy to considering whether O Bike was ever about bicycles and transport, showing how the scheme aligned itself with hyped discourses of disruption and the sharing economy, whose true beneficiaries were startup entrepreneurs developing platform-based schemes seeking venture capital and unicorn status. In Melbourne, this ‘success’ left the city with hundreds of bicycles in its waterways, and little insight or curiosity about how this was generated by a group of individuals carrying out their professed modus operandi of 2010s tech startup culture, which has no meaningful, enduring relationship with public transport or urban cycling. This re-telling of O Bike’s dispersal and fall in Melbourne seeks to focus attention within transport studies and political geography on docked and dockless public bike schemes to the occluded centrality of venture capital as a key agentic force at work in global cities in the decade just passed. The limit of this re-telling is the utopia of 2010s capitalism: unlimited profit and success without regulation or responsibility. By offering critical counterfactuals from this instantiation of dockless, it encourages policy makers to think more carefully about the value and meaning of ‘sharing’ platforms.

Suggested Citation

  • Chambers, Peter, 2020. "O Bike in Melbourne: A plea for more scepticism about disruption and capital, based on what we can know about one dockless bike scheme," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 72-80.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:140:y:2020:i:c:p:72-80
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2020.07.016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856420306716
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.tra.2020.07.016?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Monetary Authority of Singapore, 2017. "Macroprudential policies: A Singapore case study," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Macroprudential policy frameworks, implementation and relationships with other policies, volume 94, pages 321-327, Bank for International Settlements.
    2. Shaheen, Susan & Guzman, Stacey & Zhang, Hua, 2010. "Bikesharing in Europe, the Americas, and Asia: Past, Present, and Future," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt79v822k5, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    3. Elliot Fishman, 2016. "Bikeshare: A Review of Recent Literature," Transport Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(1), pages 92-113, January.
    4. Acquier, Aurélien & Daudigeos, Thibault & Pinkse, Jonatan, 2017. "Promises and paradoxes of the sharing economy: An organizing framework," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 1-10.
    5. Gu, Tianqi & Kim, Inhi & Currie, Graham, 2019. "To be or not to be dockless: Empirical analysis of dockless bikeshare development in China," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 122-147.
    6. Shaheen, Susan A & Guzman, Stacey & Zhang, Hua, 2010. "Bikesharing in Europe, the Americas, and Asia: Past, Present and Future," Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings qt6qg8q6ft, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley.
    7. Martin Tironi, 2015. "(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(2), pages 166-183, April.
    8. Clayton M. Christensen & Rory McDonald & Elizabeth J. Altman & Jonathan E. Palmer, 2018. "Disruptive Innovation: An Intellectual History and Directions for Future Research," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(7), pages 1043-1078, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alexandros Nikitas, 2019. "How to Save Bike-Sharing: An Evidence-Based Survival Toolkit for Policy-Makers and Mobility Providers," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(11), pages 1-17, June.
    2. Cai Jia & Yanyan Chen & Tingzhao Chen & Yanan Li & Luzhou Lin, 2022. "Evolutionary Game Analysis on Sharing Bicycles and Metro Strategies: Impact of Phasing out Subsidies for Bicycle–Metro Integration Model," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(22), pages 1-20, November.
    3. Ma, Xinwei & Ji, Yanjie & Yuan, Yufei & Van Oort, Niels & Jin, Yuchuan & Hoogendoorn, Serge, 2020. "A comparison in travel patterns and determinants of user demand between docked and dockless bike-sharing systems using multi-sourced data," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 148-173.
    4. Ma, Xinwei & Zhang, Shuai & Wu, Tao & Yang, Yizhe & Yu, Jiajie, 2023. "Can dockless and docked bike-sharing substitute each other? Evidence from Nanjing, China," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 188(C).
    5. Li, Shaoying & Zhuang, Caigang & Tan, Zhangzhi & Gao, Feng & Lai, Zhipeng & Wu, Zhifeng, 2021. "Inferring the trip purposes and uncovering spatio-temporal activity patterns from dockless shared bike dataset in Shenzhen, China," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    6. Mix, Richard & Hurtubia, Ricardo & Raveau, Sebastián, 2022. "Optimal location of bike-sharing stations: A built environment and accessibility approach," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 126-142.
    7. Fabio Kon & Éderson Cássio Ferreira & Higor Amario Souza & Fábio Duarte & Paolo Santi & Carlo Ratti, 2022. "Abstracting mobility flows from bike-sharing systems," Public Transport, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 545-581, October.
    8. Xinwei Ma & Ruiming Cao & Jianbiao Wang, 2019. "Effects of Psychological Factors on Modal Shift from Car to Dockless Bike Sharing: A Case Study of Nanjing, China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(18), pages 1-16, September.
    9. Jara-Díaz, Sergio & Latournerie, André & Tirachini, Alejandro & Quitral, Félix, 2022. "Optimal pricing and design of station-based bike-sharing systems: A microeconomic model," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 31(C).
    10. Gu, Tianqi & Kim, Inhi & Currie, Graham, 2019. "To be or not to be dockless: Empirical analysis of dockless bikeshare development in China," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 122-147.
    11. Virginie Boutueil & Luc Nemett & Thomas Quillerier, 2021. "Trends in Competition among Digital Platforms for Shared Mobility: Insights from a Worldwide Census and Prospects for Research," Post-Print hal-03388213, HAL.
    12. Lijuan Wang & Songbai Liu, 2020. "Study on the Influencing Factors and Consumer Behaviors of Bicycle Sharing in Beijing," International Journal of Marketing Studies, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 11(1), pages 1-40, March.
    13. Jing Lan & Yuge Ma & Dajian Zhu & Diana Mangalagiu & Thomas F. Thornton, 2017. "Enabling Value Co-Creation in the Sharing Economy: The Case of Mobike," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(9), pages 1-20, August.
    14. Nixon, Denver V. & Schwanen, Tim, 2019. "Bike sharing beyond the norm," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    15. Mooney, Stephen J. & Hosford, Kate & Howe, Bill & Yan, An & Winters, Meghan & Bassok, Alon & Hirsch, Jana A., 2019. "Freedom from the station: Spatial equity in access to dockless bike share," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 91-96.
    16. Elżbieta Macioszek & Paulina Świerk & Agata Kurek, 2020. "The Bike-Sharing System as an Element of Enhancing Sustainable Mobility—A Case Study based on a City in Poland," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-29, April.
    17. Todd, James & O'Brien, Oliver & Cheshire, James, 2021. "A global comparison of bicycle sharing systems," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    18. Mateo-Babiano, Iderlina & Bean, Richard & Corcoran, Jonathan & Pojani, Dorina, 2016. "How does our natural and built environment affect the use of bicycle sharing?," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 295-307.
    19. Ainhoa Serna & Tomas Ruiz & Jon Kepa Gerrikagoitia & Rosa Arroyo, 2019. "Identification of Enablers and Barriers for Public Bike Share System Adoption using Social Media and Statistical Models," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(22), pages 1-21, November.
    20. Büchel, Beda & Marra, Alessio Daniele & Corman, Francesco, 2022. "COVID-19 as a window of opportunity for cycling: Evidence from the first wave," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 144-156.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:140:y:2020:i:c:p:72-80. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/547/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.