Despite the transport commission’s demands that impounded bikes be collected by hire bike companies, the cost of doing so, potential per-bike fines when coming forward, and increasing regulation means the firms are staying away, according to an investigation by Q Daily (in Chinese).

Piles of thousands of bikes can be seen on the edges of many cities in China. Their sheer scale and waste has been making headlines worldwide (though the companies are still being awarded for their environmental work). The hire companies themselves are not forthcoming with data for the number of bikes or the cost of dealing with them. But Q Daily discovered information from the Hangzhou Municipal Commission of Urban Management that the labor cost of retrieving a single bicycle is RMB 9.6. This is based on the commission spending RMB 220,000 on human labor costs to deal with 23,000 abandoned bikes belonging to nine hire companies in July this year.

Apply this to the Xinhua estimate of 30,000 bikes in Shanghai’s Hongxing Road bike cemetery and you’re looking at RMB 288,000 in labor costs alone at that one site. Nanjing Urban Management Bureau told the Yangzi Evening News that they have put a fine of RMB 50 per abandoned bike in the city’s bike graveyard and have notified the hire companies.

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