Author Archives: Marv

About Marv

A avid but amateur cyclist who regularly commutes to work, rides for exercise and completes the occasional long distance event. I also write a very poor blog marvmadethis.com about the joys of work/life/cycling balance with his long suffering wife and 2 little angels under the age of 5.

The sad tale of Obikes in Melbourne

Dear Rouleurs,

What is it about OBikes that has Melbournians so worked up?? MMT rides past many of the bikes in his travels and has been amazed by the amount of vandalism that bikes have experienced. In fact MMT wonders how the operators of the scheme actually make a profit given the trail of carnage he’s seen. The plastic mud guards seem easy to break off. The wheels are frequently bent and doubled over. The latest form of vandalism involves stealing the entire seat post with saddle, rendering the bike useless. MMT really started to notice how much abuse the scheme was experiencing, when took this not-so happy snap taken in October this year.

MMT feels a bit a sympathy for this lost Obike. There have been regular newspaper articles about the large number of OBikes being fished out of the Yarra . One article really caught MMT’s eye. Back on the 19th November, the Herald Sun reported a brawl that occurred on the Metro, where some nut job took a swing at a guy who took his OBike on the train. In the interests of public safety, this is what the nut job looks like. If you are out riding and see this guy behind the steering wheel of a ute, 4WD or van, get off the road immediately.

Whilst that’s an extreme case, MMT gets the frustration that some Melbournians are feeling about this visual clutter. MMT is amazed to see these bikes being left in the back streets of Port Melbourne. That’s pretty much asking for trouble in MMT’s opinion. It seems that OBikes have become the new shopping trolley, where customers can use and dump without, it appears any significant penalty.

On face value the business case of OBike doesn’t really make much sense. You can hire a bike for about $2 for 30 minutes on a deposit of $69. If each bike is used, 10 times a day, that’s $20 a bike. So the average daily usage will be critical generating cash flow. If the deposit is representative of how much else bike costs, then I guess each bike has a break even point of about 35 rides. So how on earth does this scheme make money?? The answer seems to be in the geo-location technology used to track the bikes.

To use the scheme, a wanna-be customer downloads the app. The app shows the locations of nearby bikes. So here’s the pay off. By data mining your personal information and linking it to your trip behaviour, Obike is on-selling this information to other punters eg marketing and consumer behaviour companies (oh great people are going to sell me more stuff;-). That all sounds very big brother/Google-ish, consequently I’ll be giving the scheme a big miss.

Until next time ride safe

Marv

Marv’s September Bike Log

Dear Rouleurs,

Here’s my greatly delayed bike log for September. Garmin, you suck, have fixed their website and enabled the CVS download feature again. About time!!! Anyhooo……

September was another month messed up by YAFF – yet another f&%king flu, at the start and in the middle of the month. Gap in the middle coincided with a very cold Qualifying Final at the MCG. About 5 days later, YAFF was back and putting MMT out of action. Happily, I was well enough to attend the Preliminary Final, 2 weeks later. Still it meant that I rode for about 2 and 1/2 weeks of the month. Hence the incredibly crap total of 444 km. So here’s my monthly graph. Its distinguished by flatline totals at the start and month of the month.

As a consequence, MMT missed his his monthly target by nearly 100km. MMT is hoping for much better health and progress in October. Needless to say my Suffer Scores are pretty poor as well.

My ride log is found here.

Until next blog, ride safe.

Marv

Garmin…you suck

Dear Rouleurs,

Alas life and work have been conspiring to keep MMT away from blogging. However, much to my annoyance, the frigging Garmin site upgrade broke the download CVS feature which means MMT can’t write up his bike for October.

MMT was so irritated by this that he designed Garmin, a new corporate logo in keeping with the site’s shortcomings.

MMT visiteded the Garmin customer forum and discovered that there were, as of today, 31 complaints listed already.

Garmin fix the bloody site, before I swap to Wahoo or Polar.

Not a happy camper

MMT

Grand Final Jitters….

Dear Rouleurs,

OMG…MMT is still recovering from last Saturday night where the mighty Richmond Tigers despatched a star studded GWS Giants team. Being at the MCG filled to the rafters with Richmond supporters, was an amazing experience. The amount of noise being generated by some very one-sided barracking was deafening. Apparently at its peak it reached 126 decibels which is in realm of jack hammers and jumbo jets.

The Richmond Grand Final week experience has been nothing short of amazing. Here’s the short version.

Saturday 23rd September – Richmond defeats GWS Giants by 36 points to reach the Grand Final for the first time since 1982.

Sunday 24th September – Richmond VFL loses to Port Melbourne by 4 points. Sam Lloyd is named best afield to win the Norm Goss Medal

Monday 25th September – Dustin Martin wins the 2017 Brownlow Medal. Daniel Rioli wins Goal of the Year. More importantly MMT receives a grand final ticket out of the ballot. Trent Cotchin and Brandon Ellis avoid being rubbed out by the MRP.

Tuesday 26th September – Damian Hardwick is named 2017 AFL Coach of the Year.

Friday 29th September – Grand Final Parade

So celebrate this incredible run of Richmond achievement, MMT has posted a few photos from the Preliminary Final and from his lunchtime visit to Dusty Martin’s mural/Punt Road to celebrate the impending Grand Final.