Bike share scheme back to square one after row
1,350 cycles for hire to be placed across region
AWEST Midlands bikesharing scheme is to be relaunched after a first attempt was aborted due to a wrangle with the cycle provider.
The £16 million scheme, which will see 1,500 bikes for hire across the region, has been approved by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA).
The new scheme will see 150 e-bikes and 1,350 pedal bikes available for hire at various ‘stations’ across the region.
The process for hiring a bike will be similar to that in London, which has had a successful e-bike scheme for a number of years.
It comes a year after the collapse of the previous scheme, which would have been provided through company Nextbike.
The WMCA said the contract with Nextbike was cancelled “as a result of numerous contract breaches”, with the company set to have supplied twice the number of cycles that will now being provided by others.
The experience with Nextbike means that the future contract between the WMCA and the new provider will be a service contract, not a commercial contract, meaning the authority will take on greater liability for the success of the scheme and will be required to front some of the costs for its set up.
Cllr Ian Ward, WMCA portfolio leader for Transport and Birmingham City Council leader, said: “Following a full review it’s been determined that the client is going to have to inject some funding to make a scheme commercially viable, so we are required to put some public money in here.
“And the method that we’re now adopting is to re-procure via a service contract. There is a need to include a proportion of e-bikes within any scheme.
“None of us are getting any younger and it gets progressively difficult, especially with the hills, so e-bikes I’m sure will be widely welcomed.
“The scheme will initially operate over the seven constituent local authorities, but I want to reassure everyone that there is an opportunity for expansion to the non-constituent local authorities in the future.
“The supplier will supply all of the infrastructure and high quality maintenance regime, and will also supply the docking stations over the contract period.
“Those docking stations won’t require electricity input because the e-bikes are powered by interchangeable batteries and they are the latest generation of hire cycles that are available on the market, and they will for all bikes include three gears, which hopefully for the non e-bike users, those will be sufficient to deal with the hills across the West Midlands.”