Sheffield set to introduce another e-bike hire scheme in bid to boost cycling rates
The council is looking for an operator to make 950 e-bikes available from approximately 320 parking locations across the city
Sheffield is having a second go at offering bikes for hire on city streets – and this time they will be e-bikes to help riders cope with the hills.
The new scheme will be discussed by Sheffield City Council’s finance and performance policy committee next Monday (December 15).
The council aims to look for an outside provider to deliver and operate an e-bike hire scheme offering around 950 e-bikes available from approximately 320 parking locations.
The bikes would be hired using an app and operations and maintenance would be handled by the provider.
The committee is being asked to approve spending of £2m on capital costs related to the infrastructure of the scheme, mainly the creation of the parking bays for the bikes.
A report to the committee says: “The ownership of the bikes themselves and all responsibility for maintenance and upkeep will be that of the successful provider. The ongoing revenue cost to the authority of a contract manager for the scheme will be met by a fee payable by the successful bidder.
“There is the potential for lost parking income for the authority as some of the bike parking infrastructure, however, this will be managed within existing budgets.”
The report says that lessons were learnt from the unsuccessful Ofo yellow bike hire scheme which was “launched too widely, too quickly”. The scheme was scrapped by the firm in 2018, after just seven months.
News reports said that the firm denied that bike thefts and vandalism had caused them to walk away from the city to pursue other markets.
A University of Sheffield-run Sheffield ByCycle scheme was considered to have been “generally successful”.
There are plans to have more control over where bikes are parked, to help reduce street clutter and anti-social behaviour.
The report says: “This means there is an incentive to leave the bike at the end of the hire period in in specific physical locations, otherwise the cost of the hire will continue to increase.”
The e-bikes would incorporate multiple locking systems and GPS technology so that they could be recovered and it would be easy to see how many were in each parking location.