Mobility players gear up for 'bike battle' in U.S.
A new front has opened up in the battle for dominance of the U.S. mobility market - bicycles. Hot spot: San Francisco, where Uber and Ford are going head to head.
The Bay Area Bike Share was established back in 2013. As the name so perfectly described: a bike-sharing programme for San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. So far, so normal.
2,500 bicycles
Things shifted into higher gear when Ford Motor Company took an interest in the scheme, which was relaunched as Ford GoBike. The system now has 2,500 bicycles in 260 stations across the region (i.e. San Francisco, East Bay and San Jose).
It is expected to expand to 7,000 bicycles in 540 docking stations, across San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville and San Jose. The GoBikes are available 24/7, and can be used for anything from a single ride to an annual subscription.
Local government
The first regional, large-scale bike-sharing system on the entire West Coast, Ford GoBike is operated by Motivate, a New York-based company that operates nine bike-sharing systems in the U.S. (including in Boston, Washington DC and Greater New York).
For Ford GoBike, Motivate works in partnership with such local government departments as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. It was supported by about $11 million in initial public funding from regional transportation, environmental and municipal agencies.
Works both ways
GoBike is not the only bike-sharing scheme in San Francisco. But the competition just got a lot stiffer: earlier this week, Uber announced a partnership with Jump Bikes (pictured), a small, local bike rental startup. Uber will allow users of Jump - which just this January received permission to field 250 electric bikes in San Francisco - to book the free-floating bikes via its own app.
The advantage works both ways: Jump gets exposure with the many thousands of Uber customers in the San Francisco area, and Uber customers get another functionality, in addition to the options to carpool, ride-hail via (relatively cheap) Uber X or (more upscale) Uber Black, or order food via UberEats. It's the first time ever Uber offers rides in the U.S. on anything other than cars.
Bicycle war
But the main takeaway from the Uber-Jump collaboration is that it is squarely aimed at Ford's GoBike scheme. This could be the opening volley in a bicycle war between the large mobility players in the U.S. - just consider Free2Move, the multimodal application by PSA Group, currently being tested in a number of American cities.
It is telling that manufacturers are now moving into the furthest reaches of mobility services, including bicycle-sharing. These experiments are a way for them to diversify their earnings, in the face of threats by usage-only to ownership as the main paradigm for mobility users (formerly known as 'drivers'). The question is whether they can make these bike-sharing models profitable enough.
The coming bicycle war is not just the giants fighting against each other, but also for the favour of the customer - more specifically, in order for the various projects to pay off, a large enough group of them.
