Seattle seems like an unlikely venue for a duel between bike-sharing companies: it’s rainy, hilly, its residents can’t drive, and another bike-share program recently went belly-up publicly and ignominiously. But Ofo[1], one of several Chinese giants in the space, is the third company to launch in the city in a month. It’s the company’s first foray in the States.
Pronto, the service that crashed and burned here over the last two years, used dedicated docks in various ostensibly high-traffic areas. This inconvenient model is one of several reasons it ended up shuttering in may — after being bailed out by the city last year, no less.
The new services follow the much better model of letting users pick up and drop off bikes anywhere. It’s already hugely popular in China, where Ofo recently raised $700 million[2] to expand operations. Its rival, Mobike, had just raised $600 million — the latest, in both cases, of several rounds in the hundreds of millions.Bike sharing, and indeed cycling in general, has never been quite as commonplace in the U.S., especially in Seattle, which despite having a healthy outdoors culture is simply not suited for casual biking. That said, it’s still a dense, growing, and tech-savvy city that won’t dismiss this type of service out of hand. Car-sharing platforms like ReachNow and Car2Go have been embraced wholeheartedly.
The city just issued two permits for bike-share programs last month, one for San Francisco’s Spin and one for San Mateo’s LimeBike, and both now have wheels on the streets. I’ve noticed the orange (Spin) and green (LimeBike) bikes everywhere, and people are indeed using them.
Ofo will be the third to join in, and aims to have a thousand bikes in...
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