What an absolute waste of resources. We should get these bikes to people with real need - imagine what this would mean for a family who need to walk for hours for water or education.
But nobody's going to develop bike technology unless there's profit to be had. Best case, bike production becomes orders of magnitude cheaper due to all the investment and it becomes more effective to donate old/decommissioned bikes to those in need.
A Singapore company, O-Bike, dumped several hundred of those bikes in Zurich.
If I've seen half a dozen of them in use that's probably aiming high. Granted, that was in the last half year, when it was winter, but still.
You just see them rot away with broken parts torn off, decaying.
The bikes are of such shitty quality (an expert on bikes estimated a price of $50, max, for the parts) and are so heinously ugly that people wouldn't take them for free. Let alone buy them at auction.
The image where a person is walking on a stack of them getting some rope. The image where a person bikes by a tall stack of bikes. For a lot of the properly parked ones, I assume you are right.
He's not just getting some rope - he's untangling the rope that bundled these bicycles, when they were lowered into place. The rope was attached to a crane. You can see that crane in the picture - he's actively working on the storage site.
Yes, I imagine that may damage some of the bicycles. It's still much cheaper then alternative means of storage. It's just the cost of dealing with industrial quantities of goods - your local big box stores lose or damage some of their merchandise all the time, for similar reasons.
But nobody's going to develop bike technology unless there's profit to be had. Best case, bike production becomes orders of magnitude cheaper due to all the investment and it becomes more effective to donate old/decommissioned bikes to those in need.
Reminds me of the successful campaign by Toms: https://www.toms.com/improving-lives
I bet these companies could do something similar once established.