In 2017, Hangzhou authorities collected 23,000 abandoned shared bicycles into 16 giant corrals; a green transport boom had created fields of usable bikes

Shared bicycles had spread rapidly across the Chinese city of Hangzhou, with dockless operators letting users leave bikes without returning them to fixed stations. City authorities began removing them when riders abandoned bikes on sidewalks, near transport hubs and in other public spaces.By June 2017, authorities had collected about 23,000 shared bicycles and placed them in 16 makeshift corrals around Hangzhou. Photographs of the storage sites showed thousands of bikes packed together in open lots. The bicycles were still usable in principle, but the problem was that there were suddenly far more of them than the city's streets and parking spaces could accommodate.Hangzhou had already built one of China's largest bike networksHangzhou launched its government-backed public bicycle program in 2008 with the goal of encouraging short-distance cycling and reducing vehicle pollution. The system used designated docking stations, which gave users a clear place to return the bicycles. The arrival of private dockless companies changed that model, as companies such as Ofo and Mobike placed large numbers of bicycles directly on streets. Users could locate a bike with a phone, ride it and leave it near their destination, and that convenience removed the need to return the vehicle to a particular station.A later academic review of China's shared-bicycle networks recorded more than 858,000 bicycles in Hangzhou's government-operated system alone, alongside the much larger fleets of private operators. The city's public bicycle network had more than 3,000 docking stations, and by 2017, the dockless model was creating a second layer of bicycle infrastructure across the city, but without the same physical controls.Parking became a city-management problemA July 2017 report by Shanghai Daily said the city's urban management authority had summoned nine bike-sharing operators and warned them that bicycles needed to be parked inside marked areas. The report said that about 418,000 shared bicycles were operating in Hangzhou at the time and that more than 23,000 had been removed because of random parking. Operators could face fines of up to 20,000 yuan for blocking sidewalks and obstructing traffic.The authorities began marking designated parking areas around places such as hospitals, schools, government buildings, stadiums, museums, libraries, shopping centers and tourist sites. That response tells us about the difficulty of managing dockless bicycles at the scale reached by Hangzhou. The bikes could be placed almost anywhere, but that did not mean every location could absorb them.The corrals became a symbol of oversupplyAccording to WIRED, police and city authorities hauled the bikes to 16 corrals around Hangzhou. Seen from ground level, the sites looked like conventional junkyards, but from above, they became dense fields of brightly colored bicycles. The photographs attracted attention because they turned an invisible logistical problem into a physical landscape.Hangzhou's original public-bike program had been designed around stations and a controlled fleet, but dockless systems removed much of that physical infrastructure in favor of convenience. That meant operators could deploy bicycles quickly, but city authorities had to find new ways to control where the vehicles ended up.The numbers kept changingThe scale of the bicycle boom was difficult to contain because private companies were still adding bikes while authorities were removing them. A 2017 study of Hangzhou's shared-bicycle sector found that the number of shared bicycles in the city's six main districts had already risen above 220,000 by April, and by November, the number had reached 882,700, with daily orders between 800,000 and 1 million.The city had created a transport system capable of putting hundreds of thousands of bicycles into circulation, but then had to build another system for dealing with the vehicles that users left in the wrong places. The abandoned bicycles were not necessarily broken, as many had simply become surplus to the city's available street space. For Hangzhou, the 2017 corrals showed the physical cost of a bike-sharing model that could expand faster than the urban system around it.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.