Bike share companies will be making a few adjustments to their systems after police expressed their concern over young people using the bikes.
According to traffic laws, children under the age of 12 are not permitted to ride bicycles on public streets, while 16 is the minimum age for riding e-bikes.
Police authorities have recently been cracking down on young children (re: parents who allow them to do so) who are accessing bike shares. Many incidents on the road have raised this issue, such as inexperienced riders, people parking bikes in illegal places, and in particular, children taking turns riding the bikes.
Representatives of Mobike, Ofo, Xquchuxing and other major bike rental companies had a meeting with education commission officials and traffic authorities to discuss the problems and their respective solutions.
An agreement was made after the meeting to make adjustments such as creating a friendly pop-up reminder during user registration and changing manual locks to smart locks with an advanced password system so that they can be child-proof.
Bike share companies will no longer be placing bikes near schools and educators will also be working towards teaching kids about traffic safety rules.
Mobike, currently the biggest bike share group in Shanghai, have already implemented the pop-up message on their app as of yesterday, reminding users that the minimum age is 12.
[Image via Shanghai Daily]
