**6. Conclusions**

The issue of governing transformations within the socio-technical transition process has attracted quite a lot of scholars' attentions [27,29,63]. Regarding the daily mobility field, which is also a socio-technical system [1], how new technologies in the field of daily mobility/transportation impact existing modes of governance calls for more academic attention. Through a case study, this article explored how the adoption of new ICT-based technologies in the cycling field challenges the existing local mobility governance mode in urban China. By abandoning the need for fixed infrastructures and adding the capability to collect point-to-point travel data, the adopted technological innovations challenged the core of the governance system built for an existing transport mode and opening a governance gap. In this case, the time-lag between a new urban innovation and the corresponding governance [17,64] is the result of the collapse of the original governance logic caused by the new technologies.

This kind of influence, however, is not linear or direct but is working out through a dynamic and interactive process. The relations, actions, and interactions between involved actors within the field, especially the government and market forces, are affected by the technological innovations and in return affect the socio-technical transition process. Within the singular Chinese political and urban context, the implantation of technological innovations contributes to liberating involved private companies from various and strict governmental regulations, which improved investors' confidence in these companies. Based on this huge source of accumulated economic capital, the market forces managed to navigate a transition from "dominant actors" to "active semi-independent actors" in the cycling field. Consequently, the second generation of private companies—SBSBs companies—enjoyed fewer government regulations and even more economic resources in advancing the business model by not only providing bicycles and exerting political influence but also by reshaping the social and cultural meaning of cycling through advertising and reports. Activities that once were government responsibilities were now conducted by private companies, which challenged the government's dominant position in the hierarchical power structure of utilitarian cycling.

The findings of this article highlight the importance of analyzing the social and political attributes of new technologies/devices/innovations in the daily mobility field [12,65]. When travel patterns change, the existing governance faces a challenge and needs to be adjusted or rebuilt accordingly. The key point is to adopt a relational analytical approach and treat the new technology as an element with social impact, rather than only the outcome of certain changes. These findings provide the academia and the managers with implications for understanding the impact of innovations on achieving sustainable mobility. Besides studying cycling, this article can also contribute some insights to other relevant areas like online car-hailing governance, smart transportation development, and new energy vehicle governance. As this study mainly focused on the changing process from public bicycles to SBSBs, it certainly has the limitation that we do not track what has happened to SBSBs after they replaced the former. The story does not end here, there are continuous new changes emerging in this field, like enterprise competition and elimination, new governmental management measures, different SBSBs development patterns in various cities, etc. Besides, due to the data limitation and limited scope of discussion, this article is not connected to some other related daily travel modes, like private bicycles and e-scooters/motorbikes. They, together with sharing bicycles, constitute the transitions of urban daily mobility. All the issues can be the concern of future research.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, H.T. and S.D.; methodology, H.T.; writing—original draft preparation, H.T.; writing—review and editing, H.T. and S.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work has been supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20CSH045).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
