Stockholm Thinks It Can Have an Electric Bikeshare Program So Cheap It's Practically Free

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: This past June, Stockholm introduced a new shared bicycle service to replace Stockholm City Bikes, which operated from 2006 until 2018. Since that service shut down, the city was one of many around the world swamped by shared e-scooters that littered sidewalks and streets. As a result, the city wanted to reboot a bikeshare program with a more modern approach without succumbing to the trappings of the dockless scooter and bike craze. The new service, Stockholm eBikes, started relatively small, with just over a thousand bikes this past summer, but will grow to more than 5,000 for this coming summer. However, this is not just another bikeshare program. First, all of the bikes are electric. And second, it is ridiculously, ludicrously, almost impossibly cheap to use. The first time I stumbled on the Stockholm eBikes website and did a currency conversion, I figured there must be some mistake. The website says a 24-hour plan "just to unlock a bike and enjoy Stockholm eBikes for 24 hours" costs 11 Krona, or 98 cents at current conversion rates. A 7-day plan is 26 Krona ($2.32). A 30-day plan is 35 Krona ($3.12). And a whole year of unlimited 90-minute e-bike rides costs a measly 157 Krona, or just about $14. If you want to ride more than 90 minutes in one trip, you will be charged an extra 11 Krona (about $1) per extra hour. This is not simply cheap by e-bike rental standards. It is several orders of magnitude cheaper. And it is a story with global implications for the bikeshare industry and urban transportation in general. Because bikeshare systems have entered a paradox. The invention and proliferation of e-bikes have the potential to make bikeshare systems even more useful thanks to the effortless pedaling including on hills and higher speeds. But virtually every system has surcharges to ride an e-bike, making it expensive to use over time. "It's a truly unique system," [said Daniel Mohlin, Nordics Regional Manager for Inurba Mobility, the company that won the seven-year contract for the new bikeshare program]. "Both in terms of the technology and the setup and the pricing in combination with it." So I asked Mohlin the obvious question: How can Stockholm offer essentially the same product and service for so much less than basically every other city? The obvious assumption would be that, unlike most every bikeshare system in the world which is expected to break even without public subsidies in contrast to traditional public transportation like buses and subways, the government is helping to foot the bill of Stockholm eBikes. [...] But Mohlin said that isn't the case in Stockholm. The city isn't giving Inurba any money. Mohlin says they plan to run a profitable bikeshare system by doing one thing most other systems do and another thing he says is too often missing. The first thing, the one that everyone does, is advertising. Inurba will be selling advertisements on the bikes and on 350 advertising locations near where the bikes are parked. But the brand will remain Stockholm eBikes. [...] Advertising will only get them so far. The entire bikeshare system, Mohlin said, has been designed to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. And this, he says, is the biggest difference between Stockholm's system and the ones other cities offer. [...] Inurba adopted a hybrid solution that some e-scooter companies have piloted in a few cities. Instead of traditional docks, there are virtual stations, painted lines on the ground with a sign post. Users lock and unlock the bikes via an app. Locking the bikes requires being within one of the station's geofenced zones. These virtual stations not only save Inurba lots of money not having to outfit and maintain physical docks, but it also provides operational flexibility. Because there is some wiggle room in the geofence by nature of GPS's imprecision, the stations can "swallow a lot more bikes" than traditional docks, as Mohlin put it. This helps avoid the always-empty-or-always-full phenomenon many docked bikeshare systems struggle with. Mohlin also talked up Inurba's IT infrastructure that helps them learn which stations tend to get full at what time of day and which tend to get empty. He says this enables them to be more efficient with bike-balancing efforts, that it's "basically, do the right task in the right order at the right time." Another smaller money-saver is the company uses cargo e-bikes to go around swapping out batteries, which has to happen about once every three days per bike on average. This means battery swappers aren't stuck in traffic driving a van and can swap out more batteries per worker. So far, the model appears to be working. "55,000 active users took almost 450,000 trips, averaging six per day per bike, which is generally considered high for a bikeshare system," writes Gordon. "Plus, the average trip was almost 40 minutes, much higher than most bikeshare schemes with mechanical bikes, including Helsinki where Inurba also operates the bikeshare system where the average trip is between 12 and 16 minutes." "We're really looking forward for next year when we can get the full system in operation," Mohlin said. "But I'm confident this is a really unique system that is going to have an impact."

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