LIU ZHIXIAN was busy sorting out Mobikes on the sidewalks of Nanxin Road in Nanshan District on Wednesday.

    Sorting, managing, tracking and repairing the orange bikes scattering around the city is the daily work for Liu, 25, a maintenance worker with Mobike, one of several app-based bike operators in the city.

    He is one of hundreds of members of Mobike’s maintenance team. In charge of several streets in Nanshan District, Liu has now familiarized himself with all of the crossings and corners of the area, maintaining and sorting the bikes that could be anywhere, including the most unimaginable locations like a corridor of a residential building, a basement and even in a river.

    It is estimated that there are a few million app-bikes from dozens of companies in China, including the better known operators like Mobike, OFO and Bluegogo. Maintenance is a tough job that requires an excessive workload and time to manage the bikes.

    On every work day, Liu uses specially designed software on his phone to track and locate problematic bikes that need repair. Sometimes it is hard for him to find the bikes that have been deliberately damaged.

    The software has a GPS button that can initiate the bikes’ internal device that makes buzzing sounds to attract the maintenance workers. “With the device and my experience, it takes me a much shorter time than other people,” said Liu.

    The job is like playing a hide-and-seek game for Liu and his co-workers. They have found bikes on highways, in underground parking lots, construction sites, and even on the edge of cliffs and in the rivers.

    A bike maintenance worker from OFO, Lian Fujian has worked at the post for nearly six weeks. Due to the long walks he takes every day, Lian has lost five kilograms since he started the job. “Do you know why I love my job? Because it helps me lose weight,” said Lian.

    Lian is in charge of some areas in Luohu District. He starts a day’s work at 9 a.m. and begins inspecting the streets after a brief meeting with his colleagues. The team disperses to different areas and each of them carries a tool kit to repair the OFO bikes, usually the locks or the QR codes.

    Since most of the old OFO bikes were not equipped with GPS devices, Lian and his colleagues have to locate the bikes with their eyes and experience by following the bikes’ tracks that were uploaded to the company’s backstage system.

    Lian can now tell if a bike needs repair, even at a distance, just by looking at it. Lian said that urban villages are the places that users like to hide bikes the most, because of their complicated and narrow roads.

    Both Liu and Lian said people should protect and cherish the bikes so that more people can use them. Liu added that it was understandable that people needed time to get used to new things, but if everyone treated the bikes with care, more people could benefit from them.

    (Zhang Qian)