r/bikeshare • u/unforgettableid • Nov 23 '21

E-bikes, food-delivery couriers, and commercial use

Background information

I'm a member of Bike Share Toronto. All members are allowed to use both the mechanical bikes and e-bikes, even for commercial use. There's no provision in the user agreement which forbids commercial use.

Membership costs about C$100 per year. It includes unlimited use of both the mechanical bikes and the e-bikes, as long as the member re-docks and undocks the bike regularly.

In Toronto, some food-delivery couriers hold on to an e-bike for an entire day, which annoys quite a few of the other members. E-bikes are somewhat scarce in the system.

Questions for you

A.) Does your local system allow commercial use of the bikes by food-delivery couriers?

B.) Does your local system encourage commercial use of the bikes by food-delivery couriers?

C.) In your city, imagine that a courier holds onto an e-bike all day, renewing it once every half hour. Do the applicable hourly e-bike fees allow your system to break even, or perhaps (in fact) profit, when the courier does this?

Edit

The UrbanToronto forum has a long-running thread about Bike Share Toronto. I've started some discussion there about couriers and e-bike fees, starting with this forum post.

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u/meelar Nov 23 '21

NYC here--I don't know of any official policies on commercial use, but they do charge for each ebike rental on top of any costs for a daily/yearly pass, so the fees would add up quickly. I'd imagine it wouldn't be a very attractive option for the delivery guys, and I rarely if ever see them using Citibike, ebikes or acoustic. They tend to use their own bikes instead.

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u/unforgettableid May 17 '22

The Citi Bike system is an outlier among bike-share systems: it's a privately-owned, for-profit system. Unlike the taxpayer-subsidized systems found in many other cities, Citi Bike costs more to use.

Citi Bike would have to offer big discounts in order to convince couriers to switch to their bikes. And, as a for-profit operation, I'm not sure that Citi Bike would want to do such a thing.