It looks like Liverpool’s citybike bikeshare system will shortly be boosted with electric bikes, aka “pedal assist” or pedelecs, supplied by Freebike. Freebike is part of Homeport which was also the system supplier for the existing manual bicycle fleet there. Liverpool is a hilly city so the electric assist will no doubt be very welcome.
The Liverpool citybike system has been around since 2014 and currently has 152 bicycles across 844 docking points in 93 docking stations (another 33 stations were removed a while back after being underused – since then it has continued to expand and contract). Most dock-based systems would have approximately 45% bike/capacity ration, which suggests that Liverpool is around 228 bikes short. There have been vandalism problems in the past, and also natural attrition from regular usage and weather may be to blame. The addition of new bicycles into the fleet will doubtless go some way to plugging the gap. Photos shared by the supplier suggest at least 50 electric bikes are on their way.
There has not yet been announcement from the operator, Liverpool City Council, and so there is no pricing information for the electric bikes, information on whether they will be docked like the existing ones (Freebikes are not normally a dock-based system) or a launch date.
The council recently allocated £100,000 to citybike for “upgrading infrastructure” why may be the fund for the new bicycles themselves or infrastructure relating to them.
[Updated 12/8: Aylesbury and High Wycombe planned trial]
[Updated 14/8: Zipp approved]
[Updated 19/8: Lime app showing Birmingham as an area of (planned) operation?]
[Updated 26/8: Beryl approved]
It’s been over a month since rental eScooters have been legal on public roads and cycle paths in the UK. Since then, one trial has started and a number have been announced, with a number of eScootershare operators also signaling intent without naming specific cities (by joining the CoMoUK charitable organisation and/or announcing that their vehicles have been approved for use with the trials by the Department of Transport.) Already, a number of differences in the implementations are appearing. To date:
Trials Launched
Middlesbrough (Ginger). Part of a wider Tees Valley trial. Painted hubs. Around 50 eScooters in 3 hubs. £2/20 min. Max speed 12mph (DfT allows up to 15.5mph). Over 18s (DfT allows over 16s). Helmets advised but not mandatory. Ginger were quick out of the blocks with a system based on the Joyride platform – a slightly unfortunate name. The fleets appears to be only operational from 9am to 5pm, so not useful for people commuting. Middlesbrough is not a tourist city so one does wonder who therefore is their intended use base? As the first one, there has been a lot of media attention on any “incidents” which have included under-age users in shopping centres and users on the motorway – such locations presumably fixable with more careful geofence specification. The under-age issue is trickier – Ginger doesn’t allow under 18s – so something isn’t working quite right. Perhaps more worryingly, the fleet is already shrinking, with around 25 available. Hopefully the other 25 aren’t already at the bottom of the River Tees. Or maybe they are seeing high maintenance needs.
Trials Announced
Hartlepool (Ginger). Part of a Tees Valley trial, however its trial has been delayed indefinitely as Ginger work out the issues raised with the Middlesborough part of the trial. There are also potential political issues, with the local MP not enthusiastic.
Darlington (Ginger). Part of a Tees Valley trial. Specific launch not yet announced.
Cambridge (Voi). £1+20p/min. Helmets mandatory (not required by DfT rules). Of note, Voi will be rolling out pedelecs at the same time. Cambridge has already had Mobike and ofo bikeshares, both of which have closed.
Peterborough (Voi). This has been announced by some media however I think this is confusion over the authority name that covers the Cambridge trial above.
Milton Keynes (Lime). 250 escooters. Lime already have a fleet of dockless pedelecs in Milton Keynes so have “on the ground” experience of the challenges of managing self-service electric rental vehicles in a UK city.
Milton Keynes (Spin). MK is the first multi-operator trial.
Noteably, almost all these areas have had bikeshare systems that have failed in the past, often due to vandalism.
Liverpool (tender live)(they have an existing bikeshare that has struggled with vandalism/theft in the past – so is operating with around 25% of the bikes it should be – but despite this is very popular) – Voi?
Newcastle (a Mobike dockless bikeshare pulled out due to vandalism)
Nottingham (has a very small, but still operating, bikeshare)
Derby(had a small dockless pedelec bikeshare that closed due to vandalism)
Bristol and Bath (free-floating tender live – September launch) (Voi?) (Bristol has a currently operating dockless bikeshare, Bath has had multiple small ones that have closed due to lack of funding)
Southampton (Yobike dockless bikeshare pulled out here due to vandalism)
Essex(possibly Ipswich, which had a dockless bikeshare “Urbo” which closed shortly after launching and failed to reopen as promised. It was never clear why they didn’t but I suspect it was because almost no one actually used the bikes. The unique feature of Urbo Ipswich is the bikes had to be secured to street furniture using a secondary lock.)
London(presumably some boroughs and not others. Numerous failed bikeshare systems here – but also plenty still going.)
Recently I become part of the editorial team at the Bike-Sharing World Map (this is a new version, not yet launched) which is the world’s only comprehensive map of bikeshare systems, listing the approximately 2000 active systems along with another 1000 that are either in planning or already closed.
The Bike-Sharing World Map was compiled by the late Russell Meddin over the last 12 years and has recorded the gradual evolution of the capabilities of bikesharing systems, with Europe and Asian systems dominating, followed by a huge rise in American systems – but the massive change over the last four years has been the rise of dockless bikeshare systems, powered by smartphone apps, replacing the expensive fixed-docking-station systems, often publically financed and typically one-per-city. Instead, dockless is often entirely privately financed and the major operators run systems across hundreds of cities, often in direct competition with each other.
China invented the dockless concept and made it a “boom” industry by being able to manufacture the bikes very quickly – the timing was also perfect, with Chinese citizens, having previously cycled everywhere and quickly seen their cityscapes convert to the motorcar – perhaps were looking for a return to a simpler, cheaper and perhaps now quicker form of transport. There certainly was an investor boom-and-bust, with many cities being totally overwhelmed in 2017 with dockless bikes. Photos of huge, brightly coloured dockless bicycle graveyards became popular. Almost none of the systems were making money though, and the industry rapidly consolidated – a number went bust or were bought in 2018, the trigger being a snowballing of users requesting deposit refunds.
More recently still, city authorities started to address the problem and many of the larger ones have now introduced operator assessment and the awarding of quotas of bike numbers based on this. This means that, on the assumption that operators obey the quota directives and also maintain the largest fleets they are allowed to, it is possible to calculate the approximate number of dockless bikes in each city and by extension across the world. The operators themselves don’t typically announce their fleet sizes, for commercial reasons, and generally don’t provide public APIs either, so this is typically the most effective way to understand the numbers. The authorities don’t always publish these quotas either, but China’s local press often conducts investigations into and their local journalists are occasionally allowed access into city operations centres where sharing bicycle fleets – amongst other transport assets, are monitored.
This graphic, from a QQ article, shows a screen in such a centre in Chengdu, on which are live statistics for dockless bikeshare – one of my Chinese-speaking colleagues at UCL translated it and this is the source that Bike-Sharing World Map is using for Chengdu:
It is possible to mine Mobike’s undocumented API for bike locations, although at the centre of the densest cities, even this exhaustive approach will miss many of the bikes. Here is a map showing a snapshot of 152,300 Mobike bikes available for rent – around 1/3rd of the estimated ~500,000 strong fleet in Shanghai, earlier this month (N.B. quirks with the China datum mean the locations don’t match perfectly with the underlying OpenStreetMap map):
Some of the Mobikes in Shanghai, superimposed on a misaligned OpenStreetMap map. In the central section, the regular grid pattern is an artifact of the technique, revealing that there are many more Mobikes in this region than are shown here.
Beijing’s totals peaked in September 2017 with 2.35 million dockless bikes. In 2018 a quota of 1.91 million bikes was introduced, more recently authorities have reduced this to 900,000. The Chinese “big 3” as of 2020 are all in the capital city – Mobike (morphing into Meituan Bikes having been bought by them), Hellobike (bought by Youon, the biggest operator of docked public systems in China) and Didi’s Qingju brand (Didi is China’s Uber, it bought the assets from Bluegogo when they went bust). There is also a residual ofo presence – the app remains live and there are bikes rentable though it – although they have been largely unmanaged for a while now, the company having been embroiled in a deposit refunds scandal.
Beijing is behind just Chengdu, and possibly Shanghai, in terms of total numbers of bikes.
The industry itself continues to innovate and organise itself, with the increasing pressure from city authorities combining with the need to properly start making money. Hellobike has been one of the most nimble. It has largely avoided the investor bloat and scandals of the others by concentrating on only its home market, China, and also initially concentrating on second-tier Chinese cities, where there is less likely to be competition from Mobike/ofo/Qingju. As it has grown, it is now moving into the biggest cities and taking on all comers.
Recently, Hellobike has started to roll-out dockless hubs, which are enforced by beacons which sweep the designated areas and interact with RFID chips on the bikes. The bikes’s wheel locks will nosily unlock if a user tries to lock and end their journey outside of them. Generally, this beacon approach is much more accurate and immediate than the traditional use of GPS (or the Chinese equivalent) to enforce geofences or understand where the free bikes are for the benefit of app units and redistributors. Other organisations in China are looking at combining the extensive public CCTV camera network in many cities with China’s AI advances and machine object-detection routines, to help authorities detect which bikes are parked where and when, to help with operator scoring for future quotas.
Bike-Sharing World Map currently estimates there are 9.1 million bikeshare bikes in the world, of which at least 8.6 million (over 94%) are in China – and most of these are dockless. We are still compiling and updating the China part of the map – and the actual number could be quite a lot higher (although not as high as in mid-2017 when it was believed there were 16 million dockless bikeshare bicycles in China (10 million ofos, 5 million Mobikes & 1 million Bluegogos). The fleets may have probably halved since then, but the story of bikeshare in the world is far from complete without up-to-date numbers from China.
Terminology note: China generally refers to dockless bikeshare bicycles as “shared bicycles” or “internet bicycles” while the older dock-based systems are generally called “public bicycles” reflecting their publically owned and specified status.
There’s a new bikeshare in London – HumanForest launched yesterday (Wednesday 24 June 2020) with 63 pedelec bicycles. They are planning on rolling out up to 200 bicycles in their Islington trial operation, before hopefully expanding to central London later this summer with up to 1000 in their fleet.
HumanForest’s technology platform and equipment provider is Wunder Mobility, based in Germany. This is the first UK system using these bicycles, so I was keen to try one out in the wild.
HumanForest’s bikes are painted dark green so are a little harder to spot than the late JUMP bikes, which were luminous red, and may or may not make a return under their new owners Lime soon, or the flureoscent yellow Freebikes. They are rather sleekly built, with the battery well integrated into the frame rather than bulging out of it:
The big selling point of the bikes is their electric capabilities and price point – these are pedelec bikes with a top speed of 15mph (you can pedal faster than that but you won’t have any electric assistance). The bikes are free for your first 20 minutes each day, then 12p/minute thereafter. This is broadly comparable with Freebike’s price offering, and much cheaper than Lime’s £1/start+15p/minute pricing. (London’s Santander Cycles did demo a pedelec version last year but have yet to announce a launch date or pricing.)
HumanForest looks extremely affordable, I presume their plan is that the average user will take their 20 minute free journey to get into town, and then HumanForest will collect £2.40 for the 20 minute equivalent return journey. They should also, if they are able to expand quickly into adjacent boroughs, take advantage of the current huge surge in leisure cycling in London. Such users will typically be much less price sensitive and also likely to use the bikes for a longer time.
The HumanForest bikes ride nicely – as you would hope for brand new. European-designed bikes – with more of a power kick than Lime and Freebike, but not quite as much as JUMP offered. As ever, it’s nice to get across junctions from a standing start quickly, and to get up hills with little effort, but for longer journeys, the only very marginal battery boost above ~10mph will be frustrating.
I had a couple of technical issues – the first bike I tried refused to unlock with a “Get closer to the vehicle” message on my phone app despite being right beside the bike. The second worked fine, but had an issue with the adjustable saddle height clamp – it was a little loose, so I kept sliding down. The seat-posts do however come with a nice indication of which setting is needed, based on your own height (in cm):
Overall though, the build quality is good, the bike feels solid to use and has some nice design elements, including the saddle, which has a nice two-tone colour and a flat top, and a handlebar twist-bell.
In a sign of the times, the baskets are all fitted with a cable lock to which is attached hand sanitizer, and the HumanForest app asks you to check you have applied it before hiring:
HumanForest asks users to take a photo of the bicycle once parked at the end of the journey, this is good practice as it will help users “self police” their parking locations. I parked beside another HumanForest bike which was parked across the pavement on an inside bend – not great:
I moved it to the side of the pavement, but this off the weediest alarm I had ever heard. After three rounds of electric buzzing, all was silent again!
As always with bikeshare in London, HumanForest will live or die based on the vandalism and wear-and-tear rates, and how the operation teams deals with these. It is a small fleet, in one London borough, but there is definitely space for a third pedelec fleet in London, so the best of luck to HumanForest and hopefully we’ll see them expand far and wide.
BikeBiz reports that a dock-based bikeshare, including an ebike component, is planned for the Greater Manchester area in spring 2021, including Machester, Salford and Trafford. There will be 1500 bikes in the first phase. The tender for a provider/operator has just been published.
The city had a brief, ill-fated commercially funded Mobike dockless system, the operator soon giving up due to high levels of vandalism (the bikes themselves were also very poor). The Mobike system was also marred by frequent operating zone changes. and a lack of transparency and openness as to where the bikes were available, how they were being used and their impact (positive or negative) on the public realm.
The first phase of the system is being funded to the tune of approximately £10 million, coming from Greater Manchester Combined Authority funds. That works out at ~£6,600 per bike – similar to the ~£8,000 figures sometimes quoted for the Santander Cycles in London.
Hopefully the capital investment in a “proper” dock-based system will result in a successful operation, without the problems seen previously.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the dashboard to see how UK bikeshare is coping (or even thriving) with a socially distancing world. Here’s an update for the systems* across the UK.
London:
Lime, having been closed since late March, has suddenly reopened, with around 250 bikes on the street this morning – along way from the ~1500 earlier this year, let’s see how they ramp up.
The JUMP fleet (newly obtained by Lime) is still operating, following a two-day partial hiatus following the transfer, but with much smaller numbers. Having got to nearly 1800 earlier this year, it has been operating through the lockdown with a fleet around 600, although this morning it is down to 400. The long-term future of the fleet is unclear. However it is still seeing excellent usage, including a commuter-style morning peak.
The Santander Cycles fleet of 10000 is holding up and afternoon usage is very good, particularly at weekends and bank holidays, including some record simultaneous usage numbers on bank holiday Monday 25th May, where, at one poit, 68% of the fleet was being used. Their technology platform crashed for two consecutive afternoons on what would have been their biggest days, a couple of weekends ago. There is little commuter usage though – confirming it is a railhead-dominated system in normal times. No sign of the previously trialed electric varient.
Freebike have redeployed to focus more heavily on hospitals in central an inner London – and seeing some good usage at these hubs.
Beryl’s fleet remains very small – there are just 15 now in the City of London and Hackney, while they focus on their larger operations elsewhere in the UK.
Mobike continues to dwindle, now around 50 bikes available, a far cry from the nearly 2000 earlier in the year. Almost none of the 50 are actually in their operational area, so they may all have been stolen now.
A new electric bikeshare, Human Forest, is in “stealth marketing” mode ahead of a launch this summer. They promise that their services will be free in some form.
Rest of England:
Good recreational use numbers for Liverpool, Brighton, Bournemouth and Watford
Norwich lower but still good
Hereford surprisingly little use compared with the other bigger UK systems.
Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Milton Keynes (both) remain closed.
Scotland
Glasgow seen wildly high numbers.
Edinburgh also being well used although not as well as Glasgow. This must be a little disappointing to the operator. I suspect it is due to the largely fixed docking stations which cannot be easily redeployed to where people want to use them for the newly popular recreational use – e.g. in/around Holyrood Park, Costorphine Hill, Braid Hills, Marine Drive and the old railway-line cycle network. Instead, many of Edinburgh’s docking stations are in the city centre (but no tourists…) or at the university campus (but no students…)
Stirling is much less popular. Again, like Edinburgh, its deployment is tourist+student focused and so not set up for recreational use.
Forth Valley changed their data feed to a very complex setup which I have not yet been able to get working.
Wales:
Cardiff’s very popular
Swansea is closed.
Northern Ireland:
Belfast closed at the beginning of lockdown and has remained closed. I am sure there were good reasons for this, but it is a huge missed opportunity.
* I’m excluding the smallest systems (those with less than 100 bikes in their fleet earlier in 2020).
Further details have emerged about this summer’s escootershare UK “revolution”.
Capped at 12.5mph – below the 15.5mph for pedelec.
You’ll need a provisional or full driving licence to use them.
Only escootershare for now – personal escooters are not (yet) to be legalised.
Bicycle-style helmets to be recommended but not mandated.
Will be able to legally go where bicycles can go (so cycle tracks/lanes, roads but not pavements except where marked).
Councils will be able to dictate local policy, e.g. mandatory hub parking.
No word yet from potential operators themselves. One assumes that Lime and Bird will be the obvious two to start, in London, although neither may be in an expansion mood following painful lockdown-related layoffs recently. Bird has run the only escootershare in London and indeed the UK, so far – a small (and expensive – 25p/minute!) operation of around 15 bikes going between three hubs on the nominally private land of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.
Lime and JUMP may be merging, but the number of bikeshare operators with their eye on London won’t be falling. A new operator, Human Forest, is looking to launch this summer, promising the first “free ebike” bikeshare in the capital. (Freebike – the clue is in the name – also have a free mode of operation on their bikes, if you don’t use the battery-assist.)
Their website is sparse but includes a photo of their bike – intriguingly apparently without a wheel lock:
Uber has offloaded its JUMP ebikeshare and (outside the UK) escootershare operation, to Lime, and invested a sum of money in Lime. The move has resulted in a large number of job losses at JUMP, as Uber looks to shore up its finances and focus on those currently profitable. It is the end for JUMP which arose from Social Bicycles (whose largest operation was the GRID bikeshare in Phoenix, USA) as their ebikeshare brand, before being bought by Uber.
JUMP had suspended its operations globally except for in Milan and London, perhaps an indication of the two cities where it remained popular. Certainly, the system was (and still is) well used in London, with each bike normally being used for multiple journeys a day – always a healthy sign for a bikeshare system. JUMP’s London fleet is currently 600 bikes – around a third of its 2020 maximum. Following the Lime offloading, the bikes most disappeared from London streets for a couple of days and nights – possibly while the local operating team was digesting the news – but are now back and continuing to be used well.
I understand that Lime, who withdrew their bikes at the beginning of lockdown, will be likely not putting their own fleet of bikes back out on the streets of London, instead using (and presumably rebranding) the JUMP fleet they now own, due to the better hardware and performance of the latter bike. Lime had mainly moved to escootershare anyway, except in London.
It will be interesting to see how London’s bikeshare map looks following the merger of the two biggest electric fleets and the resumption of normal service post-lockdown. Lime operated in more areas of London than JUMP, and also tended to operate in areas without formal agreements with the borough councils – they also have not published an availability fleet, the only UK operator to not do so. They also frequently expanded and shrunk their operating area. JUMP on the other hand has taken a more formal approach. The two had some overlap but also operated in different boroughs – it is not clear whether the permitting in Hackney, for instance, will transfer to Lime. Hackney operates a hub-only permit model, with two seats, currently awarded to JUMP and Beryl.
The government has today announced that they are fast-tracking making escooters, and by extension escootershare, legal, on UK roads from June. The planned four trial areas, which were announced a few months ago, have been expanded to cover the whole of the, UK, as the government shifts from a prescriptive, cautious approach, to allowing a mode of transport that could have substantial benefits to a population potentially avoiding public transport post-lockdown and roads that will not be able to take the anticipated increase in car volume:
E-scooter trials will also be brought forward from next year to next month to help encourage more people off public transport and onto greener alternatives. Originally set to take place in 4 Future Transport Zones, the trials of rental e-scooters – which will now be offered to all local areas across the country – will allow government to assess the benefits of e-scooters as well as their impact on public space, with the potential to see rental vehicles on UK roads as early as June.
The UK’s only active public escootershare service, Bird, which operated a small fleet of around 15 escooters between three hubs on technically private parkland in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, abruptly shut down at the beginning of lockdown in late March.
Global escootershare firms, including Bird and Lime, have been increasingly frustatingly lobbying the government for legislation, over the last few years. But it has taken a looming transportation crisis in London and after cities, on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a change of Transport Minister, to make it happen. Better late than never.
Bikesharp welcomes these extra micromobility options that soon could be on UK streets, and is also intrigued by the announcement of a “Bike tube” organised by TfL – improved central London bicycle routes that mirror the tube running beneath them.
