Can the city that failed at Just Eat bikes now go dockless?

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

Unlike the previous scheme, the new one will be 'dockless' - in which bikes can be located, hired and unlocked using a smartphone app and don't require a docking station - and it could be arriving very soon.
An initial 'diluted version' of the Edinburgh scheme is hoped to roll out before the Edinburgh Festival, with, said a council officer, 100-200 dockless cycles across the city centre by August. If successful it could expand to between 600 and 800.
The previous troubled project, introduced in 2018, lasted only three years and was beleaguered by problems, especially vandalism and theft, which made its self-financing model unsustainable for Serco, its provider.
By Spring 2019, the initial 500-strong fleet of cycles, delivered by Serco and sponsored by Just Eat, had been reduced to about 300, with many bikes out of service for repair. In its second year, around one in four of the scheme's 550 bikes had to be repaired each week because of vandalism, wear and tear, and weather-related issues. Docking stations were also damaged.
It is also not the only city to have tried and failed on a bike share scheme. Manchester, for instance, with much fanfare introduced its Mobikes in 2017, but within a year, the Chinese dockless bike firm withdrew from the city following their constant vandalism, and hundreds of bikes each month ending up at the bottom of the Manchester Ship Canal and other waterways. Since then the city has tried again, with a docked system, their Bee bikes.
According to Councillor Stephen Jenkinson, transport convener for the City of Edinburgh Council, a keen advocate for the new scheme, since the city's initial bike experiment, the technology, including GPS, gyroscopes and software, 'has advanced significantly'.
'The companies,' he observed, 'know where all their bikes are. They know what state the battery is in. They know whether it's where it should be, whether it's not where it should be; whether it's upside down, lying on its side. It's the responsibility of them as a service provider to ensure that this is a success. The management and the maintenance of the service will be provided by that third party. And ultimately they don't want it to fail.'
The new technology, he explained, also means the service 'can flex quite quickly' because they will have access to a level of data that the previous service did not have.
"If," he said, "there are areas of the town where either we as a local authority, or they as a provider, are uncomfortable with then that can be discussed and managed. We can also control not only the locations of where the bikes can be picked up and dropped off, but the speed at which the bikes can be used – and we can control that in different parts of the town."
Cllr Stephen Jenkinson tries out a Dott e-bike (Image: City of Edinburgh Council)
The two-year trial scheme is set to be entirely electric (around a third of Just Eat bikes were electric and all used metal docking stations).
Cllr Jenkinson explained the decision to go all electric: 'Edinburgh isn't known for being a particularly flat city. It's not the easiest city to get around under your own steam. With this, we're not looking to convert people who are already cycling to cycle more. What we're hoping to do is convince people who don't necessarily use cycling as their main mode of transport to consider it.
"To allow that to happen you've got to make it as easy as possible. So it has got to be affordable and it has got to be relatively easier and it's certainly easier cycling on an e-bike up the mound than it would be out of the saddle.'
READ MORE:
Already, the City of Edinburgh Council has had a 'show and tell', in which two companies, Dott, Europe's largest shared e-mobility provider, and Californian company Lime, talked through their offering.
Councillor Jenkinson described those sessions as 'well attended by both councillors across all parties and officers as well and those companies got a pretty hard time - I don't think they were expecting the level of scrutiny that they got'
Ultimately, other companies will be considered through an open procurement process. Since there is no funding within the council's budget to deliver a cycle scheme for Edinburgh, what is being investigated is whether it's possible to deliver a scheme at no cost to the council, where the risk is absorbed by the providers.
Dockless bike schemes do have their problems and they can be seen in the experiences of other cities in the UK. For instance, in London a significant proportion are still 'hacked' (essentially stolen/used for free). At one point the rate was believed to be 5% of trips, but Lime, last year, issued an official company statement saying: 'Antisocial behaviour is rare and hacked trips now account for 1% of total trips.'
The schemes have also suffered from complaints about the way the bikes are dumped, left on pavements. Last year, for instance, 'around 100 complaints' had been made about a dockless bike trial in Haringey, delivered by both Lime and British provider Forest, mostly about dockless bikes being left strewn across pavements.
Lime bikes strewn on a pavement in Kingsbury (Image: Bremt LB)
Haringey "creative action" campaigner, Martin Ball, told me: 'The dockless bike scheme has created accessibility problems across Haringey, as it has London-wide. There are bottleneck areas where mass ending of journeys leaves a large number of bikes in one area. Often making them difficult for people to get through.'
'While this might be an inconvenience for many; for those with sight loss or a physical disability it is a significant barrier and a hazard. Narrow pavements have even less space. Large bulky bikes are often on the ground on their side and this is dangerous especially in poor lighting.'
'Another consequence of the Tottenham stadium being used for large events as well as football matches is that spectators travel and leave the bike wherever is convenient for them but a frequent nuisance for residents. One lone bike doesn't seem a problem, but discarded in the streets around the stadium, they often block pathways as on pavement parking is legal on many Tottenham roads.'
A Dott bike carelessly dumped in Colchester (Image: Finley Greenleaf, Colchester Sixth Form College)
There are also concerns about the road behaviour of riders, as well as safety, and recent articles described how orthopaedic surgeons were having to treat 'Lime bike leg', patients with legs broken after being pinned under the heavy bikes.
But it's also worth acknowledging that for all the complaints, the experiment with dockless bikes in London is also seen as a success in the sense that it has resulted in more people cycling in London.
A recent article in the Economist, titled 'London has become a cycling city', credited the scheme with being an important element in a significant uptick in cycling in the city, which according to a traffic survey, was up by 57%.
'What changed?' it said. 'Most riders still use personal bikes, which account for 60% of the increase since 2022 (helped by all those cycle lanes). But in the past two years, the use of rental-electric bikes has increased four-fold. So ubiquitous is a whizzy white-and-green variety that the fruit they are named after has become a verb: 'Shall we Lime?'
On cycling news platform road.cc, writer George Hill described them as 'brilliant'. He wrote: 'The other day I was at a friend's birthday party in Rotherhithe, and I was staying near Tower Bridge. That would have cost me £20 and 20 minutes in a taxi each way, and it would have taken me about 25 minutes by tube; but on a Lime bike, I could do it in 12 minutes and it cost me about three quid.'
They have also been hugely popular with the young. Half of all Londoners between 18-34 use them every single week.
Meanwhile, Glasgow's nextbike scheme, which uses a docking system, is now over a decade old, and in those years since the folding of Edinburgh's Just Eat bikes, has been quietly running with little drama - though it is not without its problems. Residents talk of the need for more docking bays, more bikes and in better repair.
The chief executive of the City of Edinburgh Council, Paul Lawrence, said: 'I was in other cities over the last couple of weeks and some of the evidence I saw was really, really good and some of it you looked at it and went 'I'm not sure about that'. It's kind of the nature of the beast.'
Reflecting on the previous scheme, he said, 'Were there Just Eat bikes in the Water of Leith? Yes, there were. Was it managed in the way we wanted it to be? Most of the time but not completely. The important thing on our side of the fence is to make sure to the operator that our criteria and our expectations are crystal clear, and that's what we will do and see how it goes this time around.'
Council leader, Jane Meagher, said: 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we're going to be serious about getting people out of their cars then we need to offer a whole range of options for folk, including for visitors of course.
'My thoughts are suck it and see. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.'
Such a scheme, observed Jenkinson, is not about getting people who already cycle to cycle more 'it's about convincing people who don't actually cycle at all, or not very often, that it's a viable option'. People may, it is conceived, might use them for part of a journey rather than a whole journey, shifting between different modes of transport, bus, tram, bike.
Jenkinson gave a personal example of how this might work. 'To get home quite often I'll get two buses. If I had the opportunity to use a bike to get from the City Chambers to Tollcross, would I do that? Quite possibly and I could get home quicker by using multiple forms of transport. That's a good use case.'
Once approved, with no infrastructure to be installed other than painting on the pavements, it could take just weeks to get the bikes onto the streets. For the purpose of the trial, said Cllr Jenkinson, it will be focussed only on the city centre area of Edinburgh. 'But I'd like to think that if we have a really successful trial and the people of Edinburgh think that this is deemed a success, working with whoever provider we have, I can certainly see the coverage expanding across much of Edinburgh.'
'Maybe not everybody,' he added, 'is as bought into this as I am. I'm fortunate enough to travel around Europe and the world, and you can see how these schemes have developed over the years, and I suppose I'm fortunate that I don't bear the scars of the previous scheme because I wasn't elected to the local authority at that time. I look at this with a fresh pair of eyes, but also armed with the evidence of seeing how it can be successful.'
With additional reporting by Donald Turvill.