Stunning Photos of China’s Haunting Bike Graveyards

In 2014, we exposed the world to the reality of malinvestment, ‘channel stuffing’, and the aftermath of a credit-fueled bubble in auto manufacturing with shocking images of where the world’s unsold cars go to die.

Four years later, we shift geographically from The West to The East, and exchange four wheels for two as the disgusting waste and sheer scale of China’s debt-pumped investment bubble is fully exposed – not it ghost cities (for once), but in the eerie images of what happens when the ‘sharing economy’ meets reality…

China’s ride-share graveyard is exposed as a monument to the ‘uber for bikes’ industry’s arrogance…

For the past 18 months many cities in China have been flooded by millions of dockless share bikes.

As The Guardian reports, those that block pavements or apartment entrances have been removed by authorities to vast storage areas. Viewed from afar they create compelling and mysterious patterns – but also represent waste on an enormous scale…

An aerial view of the rental bikes detained by the local urban administration authority of Luyang district in Hefei. Given that the shared bikes have several users a day – some of them inexperienced riders who swerve into traffic – they are often damaged, vandalised, or abandoned…

Share bikes found illegally parked in an enclosure in Nanning. Dubbed ‘ Uber for bikes’, the customers rent bikes using their smartphones and can drop them off anywhere…

Tens of thousands of abandoned share bikes piled up at a car park in Nanjing. The bikes are crammed into the 82-metre-long and 60-metre-wide parking space reaching a height of nearly two metres…

Discarded Bluegogo share bicycles crammed into a car park in Beijing. Bluegogo, China’s third largest bike-sharing company, went bankrupt last year…

Numerous abandoned share bikes in Wuhan…

Piles of abandoned share bikes in Shanghai…

Thousands of bicycles sit near a flyover in Beijing’s Tongzhou district…

Abandoned bicycles from various bike-sharing services in Shanghai…

Finally, to put this debacle in context, Shanghai currently has 1.5 million shared bikes on the streets, and despite its population being three times greater than London, that number far outstrips the 11,000 Santander Cycles peppered throughout the UK capital.