With around 20 million rides a day in over 50 Chinese cities, Mobike are the pace setters in the country's recent shared bike boom, and using their vast bank of travel data, they've teamed up with the China New Urbanization Research Institute to analyse just how their two-wheelers are changing commuter behaviour, our lifestyles and the cities we live in.
They released a paper back in April revealing their findings, and there's some pretty interesting facts and figures to come out of it, starting with the big one.
Mobike users have travelled a total of 2.5 billion kilometres
That's the equivalent of going to the moon and back 3,300 times. Or, if you like to keep things more earthly, 1.9 million trips between Shanghai and Beijing.
Bikesharing has doubled the use of bicycles
As part of the research, the team also surveyed 100,000 users to dig a little deeper, and found that 11.6 percent of them took two wheels as their main mode of transportation, of which 6.8 percent rode a Mobike, with just 4.8 percent using their own ride – down from 5.5 percent pre-bikesharing. Still, positive news for cycling.
Men take more rides than women
Perhaps unsurprising this one, given the guys' significant headstart, with an estimated 33 million more men in China than women. It also so happens that Mobike's largest user demographic is males under the age of 32.
Male retirees ride the furthest and the fastest
Go grandpa! It seems the bikesharing revolution has given the seniors a new lease of life, and while the under-32s may be more numerous than their greying counterparts, it is the retirees who are speeding away from the peloton, leaving every other demographic in their dust and claiming the title of kings of endurance. A few questions unanswered though: where are they going? And what are they running from?
'Female college students' are reportedly the slowest riders, while vaguely described 'young working ladies' travel the shortest distances.
91.9 percent of Shanghai trips shorter than 5km are quicker by shared bike
Image: Mobike
Well, a combination of shared bike and public transport at peak traffic, that is. The whole aim of the paper seems to be to tell us that cars suck, that we should hate them and never use them ever again. Which is probably true.
So it's official, take the bus or subway, take a bike and weave through the traffic, and you'll probably get from A to B quicker. For trips over 5km, 43.4 percent of journeys are quicker, which, all things considered, is still pretty significant.
Users reported a 55 percent decrease in car trips
Surveyed users said that, since the dawn of smart shared bikes, they had taken less than half the trips they had previously in their own car, by Didi, taxi or private chauffeur.
Heavy pollution does not impact people's bikesharing behaviour
Image: Mobike
Come rain, come shine, come deathly smog cloud, riders are ridin' on, or at least that's what the table above seems to be showing.
'Bikesharing saves urban spaces'
Image: Mobike
We have slight reservations about this one – many urban spaces have descended into complete and utter, untold chaos as Mobike and Ofo – as well as whichever new challenger of the week has popped up – compete for blanket coverage of street corners.
But there is rational truth to what they're suggesting – the space needed to park a bike is, obviously, significantly smaller than that of a car, so if we could all just get rid of our motors, we would, obviously, free up lots of nice space to do nice things like build nice homes and parks.
'By reducing the amount of space needed for cars and other vehicles, bikesharing frees up enough urban space to build 600,000 homes [across the country],' the report claims. 'In Shanghai, the space saved is 15 times the size of People's Park'.
More from Time Out Shanghai
18 brilliant things to do in Shanghai this week
