Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

New permitting and registration fees have killed off at least one bike-sharing company previously operating in Dallas, Texas.

Which means that instead of helping people commute, run errands, or visit friends, thousands of yellow bikes previously operated by Ofo, a Beijing-based bike-sharing firm, are now heaped in a city recycling center like a massive modernist monument to poor civic policy.

Ofo decided to pull out of Dallas after the city passed new rules requiring an $800 registration fee and permit fees of $21 per bike, according to The Dallas Morning News. While there were more than 20,000 shared bikes available in Dallas—including roughly 5,000 operated by Ofo—before the city’s new registration fee system went into effect, there are now only about 3,500 such bikes available, the paper reports.

Bike-sharing companies and other app-based transportation options like electric scooters have popped up in many major American cities over the past two years, offering a competitively priced alternative to struggling public transportation systems and ride-sharing services. They are hip, useful, and environmentally friendly—in other words, they are everything that city transit planners usually love, except for the fact that they are operated by private companies instead of as public monopolies.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons