So the grand Ofos experience is over. I wrote a few weeks ago about the struggles that Ofos was having in Camden, and some of the successes. The bikes were popular and being used, but faced challenges around security, culture, and just the pure number of them in the city (not enough to be confident one would be around when they you left wherever you were going). But people wanted to use them, and part of the challenge was that they were being used throughout the city in ways that made it hard for a limited number of bikes to cover enough of the city. It was only natural to assume that when Ofos announced the abrupt end of the Camden pilot, that it was due to these challenges. Except it wasn’t.
But growth was slower than expected in the U.S., where human-powered bicycles have proven less popular than Ofo and other backers expected. Ridership in many U.S. cities is well below what the companies need to break even, said former Ofo employees. Adding to the challenge, dense markets like Boston and Manhattan have exclusive bike-share agreements with companies that have installed docks—blocking the entrance of dockless companies.
That’s important, because much of the narrative here focused on stolen bikes — a narrative that fit too nicely with the idea that people in a poor city would be inclined to steal bikes in a dockless system. If that was the case, it was not the reason the pilot was ended. The pilot was ended because of wider structural issues across multiple cities that resulted in Ofos pulling back from a massive expansion into this market.
See, it’s not always about Camden.
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