This article originally appeared on our sister website, Urban Family Shanghai.
By Yuzhou Hu
If you’re a Shanghai-based Mobike user you’ve likely received a notice announcing that prices will increase beginning May 13, Shine reports.
According to the new price standard, users will have to pay RMB1 for the first 15 minutes and RMB0.5 for every extra 15 minutes. Previously, users only needed to pay RMB1 for every 30 minutes.
Seasonal pass users used to be able to ride as long as they wanted for free. However, they can now only ride for two hours for free. After two hours they must pay RMB0.5 for every 15 additional minutes.
Image via The Paper
This is not the first price adjustment for Mobike. Back in 2016, when shared bikes first entered the market, the fee for riding every 30 minutes was only RMB0.5.
Since most people only use shared bikes for short amounts of time, many netizens seem unaffected by the news.
“I‘m OK with the price increase as long as they can maintain their bikes routinely so that I won’t bump into any unusable scraps,“ commented one netizen on The Paper.
“The new price makes more sense,” wrote another. “I can’t imagine how they managed to survive that long with their original price.”
Mobike is not the only shared bike firm to adopt a new charging standard. Bluegogo, which bit the dust at the end of 2017 and got resurrected by Didi in early 2018, raised its prices back in March. Its new price policy is the same as Mobike’s.
Hellobike increased its price as well. Starting in April, locals in Beijing are charged RMB1 for every 15 minutes and residents in Shanghai have to pay RMB1.5 for every 30 minutes. Consequently, Hellobike has been dubbed the ‘most expensive shared bikes in Shanghai’ by netizens.
Ofo is now the cheapest shared bike service, though the company is still under immense pressure with millions of users waiting to get their deposits refunded. The firm charges RMB1 for every hour.
[Cover image via Kentaro IEMOTO/Flickr]
This article was originally published by our sister magazine Urban Family Shanghai. For more articles like this, visit the Urban Family website, or follow the Urban Family WeChat account (ID: urbanfamilyshanghai).
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