MANCHESTER, United Kingdom (CCTV) — China’s bike-sharing operator Mobike is gaining traction in UK’s Manchester just a few weeks after its arrival in the city.
Steve Pyer, general manager of Mobike’s UK division, while expressing the service’s popularity, said each bike gets used nine times a day.
“There were 20 bikes there 10 minutes ago, and the last two are about to disappear. So they are being used every day, up to nine times a day each bike is ridden, which is just remarkable. So it’s very popular,” said Pyer on Friday.
The service, which kicked off a pilot scheme with only 1,000 bikes in June, has been successful thus far, because its easily accessible and affordable too – a little over 50 cents an hour.
“I think it’s really good; it’s really convenient. I enjoy it. I have not really cycled that much before myself. So it’s maybe pick up cycling in a way that I hadn’t previously,” said one of the local residents who has started using the service extensively.
While another Mobiker said, “It’s cheap and quite accessible to everybody. So it can save you a lot of time in the city; it can save you half an hour, you know, if you’re to do 50-minutes’ walk, one way or the other. So yeah it’s good.”
However, a lot goes on in deciding how many bikes the city actually needs.
“We have regular meetings with transport for Manchester and the city councils. We just discuss whether we have got enough bikes, how many more we can get,” said Pyer.
The authorities need to approve for Mobike to put any extra bike out in the street, he noted. So the only way to show that there’s a bigger demand is to back it up with a lot of data and statistics.
Mobike, as the pioneer of the bicycle-sharing sector, has expanded its business model even to London and Florence a few days earlier.
