Shanghai stems tide of shared bikes

Shanghai is asking new bike-sharing services to stop adding new two-wheelers to the city’s streets, in a bid to stop the city’s downtown area from being flooded by a tide of brightly colored bicycles, Caixin reports.  The Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission recently met with six major bike-sharing app operators and urged them to temporarily stop placing more bikes in the city’s central district where sidewalks were quickly becoming overwhelmed. The Shanghai Bicycle Industry Association issued a warning on its website, saying that the limited number of parking spaces in the city has been stretched to their limits by thousands of orange, yellow, blue and other brightly colored bikes from 12 operators. The association said that 450,000 rental bikes are scrambling for 20,000 available bike parking slots in the city. The two biggest operators, Ofo and Mobike, both said they hadn’t been notified about the request to stop placing new bikes in the city.