Bike-sharing business needs govt support

Bicycle-sharing companies have put more than 200,000 yellow and orange bicycles into service in Beijing in the past month. To use a bike for 1 yuan ($0.15) per hour, you have to download the app of any of the companies, pay a few hundred yuan as refundable deposit, and scan the code on a bike to unlock or lock it.

The bikes are popular among commuters, many of whom use them to cover the distance between subway stations or bus stops and office or home. But the lack of bicycle parking lots - most of which have made way for car parking lots - poses a challenge to cyclists.

The disorderly parking of such bikes at street corners has created a problem for chengguan, urban administrative officers, who are not enough in numbers to manage the cyclists and tell them to park the bikes at the right place. Chengguan in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan province, confiscated hundreds of such bikes in November because they were "illegally encroaching upon public place". But bike-sharing remains popular in Chengdu three months later.