Abandoned shared bikes becoming an eyesore in your neighbourhood? Report them with this app

SINGAPORE — Residents frustrated with shared bicycles indiscriminately parked or abandoned in their neighbourhood will have a new way to report them, via the Municipal Services Office’s (MSO) OneService mobile application.

Information sent via the app will be passed on “directly” to the bike-sharing operators for action to be taken, MSO said in a press release on Thursday (Nov 2). The operators would have to remove the bike within half a day.

The move comes on the back of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) inked by five bike-sharing operators with the Land Transport Authority (LTA), National Parks Board, and the 16 town councils, aimed at encouraging responsible bike-sharing behaviour.

As part of the MoU, which was signed on Oct 5, the five operators — oBike, ofo, mobike, Gbikes and SG Bikes — will have to adopt geo-fencing technologies by the end of the year.

Geo-fencing enables the operators to know whether their bicycles have been parked within designated bicycle parking zones.

As part of the agreement, the bike-sharing operators must also remove faulty bicycles within a day, and provide public liability insurance for users.

“The OneService app category supports this effort by offering a convenient channel for residents, who do not make use of the bicycle-sharing apps, to report shared bicycles that are causing obstruction in their neighbourhood,” said the MSO.

With the feedback, the authorities will be able to “develop a more accurate sense of residents’ concerns regarding dis-amenities caused by shared bicycles”, it added.

For instance, the MSO will be able to find out the locations in a neighbourhood where indiscriminate parking is a regular occurrence, and take the appropriate response to tackle the problem.

In a reply made in Parliament in July, Senior Minister of State for Transport Lam Pin Min said the LTA had received around 70 complaints regarding indiscriminate parking since the start of the year,

“LTA has served around 1,000 notices for indiscriminately parked bicycles, of which 200 bicycles have been impounded, and about half of the impounded bicycles have been collected by the companies,” Dr Lam told the House.

Bike-sharing operators here have implemented a raft of measures to stem the problem of indiscriminate parking. It was reported in April that oBike announced a carrot-and-stick, community-policing system which will award or deduct credits from users based on their behaviour, which will affect how much they have to pay for their rides.

TODAY had also reported that mobike has a similar credit system, while ofo encourages its user to report such behaviour through its app.

MSO’s feedback category for the shared bikes follows a similar feedback channel launched in April last year in partnership with major supermarket chains, for the public to provide feedback on abandoned shopping trolleys.

CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this story, we reported that shared bike operators will need remove bikes parked indiscriminately within a day. This is incorrect. They will need to remove them within half a day. We apologise for the error.