Ofo Exits Camden in a Cautionary Tale About Venture-Funded Bike-Share

For one week, ofo bicycles were everywhere in the City. The week was capped off when Mayor Moran led a celebratory bike ride on Friday, May 4th.

But by the end of that weekend, the bikes were difficult to find.

You could see plenty of them available on the ofo app, but often when you went to a location: nothing. We received reports of bikes in the back of pickup trucks and being taken on the RiverLINE train to points beyond the City.

We saw bikes with the rear fender torn off (where the lock and GPS sensors are located).

For reasons unknown to us, Camden County Police were impounding some of the bikes.

When ofo officials were asked about the deficit of bikes at a meeting, they cited people not relocking the bikes after they rented them. In that meeting, ofo also promised that 300 more bicycles were on the way.

We are only able to report on what we saw because ofo would not publicly disclose usage or losses of bicycles. What we were able to do was track the availability of bikes, but even that was a challenge.

Unlike Indego, where you can see the availability of every bicycle station, the ofo app only shows you what is nearby. So we relied on the ubiquitous TransitApp which scraped the ofo bike location data and put it nicely on their map. We spot checked locations on the ofo to verify that the information was current.

What we found is that only a tiny percentage of the 200 bikes were available for use. On May 9th, we located only 26 available bikes on the app. One month later, on June 10, only seven total bikes appeared on the TransitApp map. ofo deployed a few dozen additional bikes on the street in mid-June.

Within days, most of those disappeared, too.