Their disposal has been far more deliberate than “abandoned” suggests: Melburnians (or at least, some Melburnians) seem to have embarked on a competition to see who could leave one of these bikes in the oddest place. Last year, it took oBike contractors just four hours to fish 42 oBikes out of the Yarra between Jeff's Shed and the Hoddle Street bridge. I’m surprised we haven’t seen one hoisted from the Arts Centre spire or dangling from the Westgate Bridge (don’t get any ideas).

Mostly they’ve been left scattered on footpaths and roadsides around the city, stationed where the operators of the scheme thought to station them, and later where riders had ditched them.

In the north I tracked their progress towards the suburbs from the inner city – along Lygon Street, up Nicholson, eventually crossing Bell Street, which seemed like a mark of something: maybe this untethered app-based bike scheme was going to catch on. No doubt the story was similar in other parts of Melbourne.

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The prankish placement of the bikes was funny at first, then it just became a bit ho-hum. In the end, it seems to have killed the scheme, with the operators announcing on Tuesday that they were taking their bikes and going home: new EPA regulations designed to keep the bikes in some kind of order (including a $3000 fine for each one blocking a city street for more than two hours) will be just too onerous.