Beijingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 14 year-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…
Living in Beijing sometimes feels like living in the future. New industries seem to pop up (and die) overnight, along with a whole host of jobs and occupations that never existed before. In this week’s Throwback Thursday, we dug out an article from 2017 that explores the world of Beijing’s “bike hunters”. The article was written by Chloe Sandifer-Stech, who was a student at Yew Chung International School of Beijing (YCIS Beijing) at the time, as part of our ongoing Student Correspondent program and we think it’s a pretty fascinating peek at a job that most of us have never even heard of.
Back in 2017, shared bikes were still a relatively new phenomenon, and we were all adjusting to the sudden appearance of thousands of bikes scattered around the city. The shared bike industry has been a pretty disruptive force (for both good and bad) and one of the ongoing problems with the system is accessibility: they tend to pile up in giant mounds like garbage where they are not wanted, while in other parts of town they are squirreled away and kept illegally behind locked doors, so that users can ensure they’ll always have easy access.
One solution to the problem? Hiring people to specifically track down and relocate such stray units.
These workers begin their day by signing into an app specific to the company they work for, whether that be Ofo, Mobike, or one of the many other bike-sharing businesses in Beijing. The app’s job is to detect the locations of bicycles for the company, and provides a GPS feature that directs the bike hunters to the bikes’ exact spot.
While most people associate the bike hunters’ job as just relocating them to more popular locations, they also do a lot more work than we may realize…
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