Spin wants to bring dock-less bike sharing to the US
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We got a prototype working with a custom Android device with touch, 3g, GPS, and built in credit card swiper in Lansing MI, but ultimately we b it off more than we could chew. The team collapsed in mid 2015, and the company was just recently completely shuttered. It's validating to see a more skilled team put together a solid product, but damn it would have been fun to be that team haha.
Best of luck!
Don't put yourself down. It looks like the founders are reasonably well financed, probably well connected, and of course the Bay area effect.
We tried to use 3d printed cases for the prototype units, but it turns out 3d printed material (at least the type we used) is porous and doesn't respond well to heat expansion when left out in the sun. We spent far too long trying to get our 15 printed cases to be watertight, and once we finally did, they expanded in the sun and cracked. But we couldn't afford injection molding and didn't properly explore cheaper plastic casting methods.
We spent a bunch of money on tooling for cast aluminum parts that ended up being about 1/32" too tight and complicated fitting components in. And we had a major scope creep in the form of wanting to support mid-rental lockup (we were "stationless" in that the bikes had all the tech, there was still a rack that rentals started/ended at) via a retractable pin and chain, that ended up causing electrical issues with detecting lockup, condensation issues due to the larger openings, much more complicated mechanical workings... I honestly think that if we had cut that single feature, things might have turned out differently.
I've lived in SOMA for years, and have always wanted to bike around, except: (a) it was always a hassle to deal with a bike after going around town, because I would inevitably end up Uber-ing somewhere after my first stop and (b) my bikes would get stolen :(
Would love to hear any questions you guys had about the business, and look forward to you guys riding our bikes soon.
ps. If you want to follow along or have any questions about Spin or startups in general, I'm 'euwyn' on Whale and Snapchat.
[1] https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM10848...
Since you are one of the co-founders you should be able to spend at least some effort on answering the actual question or explain why you would chose not to do so.
I've never noticed theft, and while there was some initial vandalism it never impacted our experience.
My local program allows us to check out 4 bikes at a time, per account. Last summer, my partner and I would check out 8 bikes and go out on the town with friends. The ability to share my bikeshare with my friends allows me to ride a lot more - it sucks to be in the mood to go for a ride and be hanging out with people who don't have bikes.
PS. This is Derrick, one of the co-founders of Spin :D
Also, getting sign-off & GPS to work reliably in urban environments - it is super frustrating paying by the minute and being unable to stop the clock - or being directed to a bike location and finding nothing there.
This is why I don't ride a bike in Philadelphia. I don't know anyone here who rides a bike and hasn't had it stolen at least once.
The only way to guarantee your bike isn't stolen is to bring it inside, which isn't an option at most workplaces. And even if it was an option it's a huge hassle.
7 mile commute in London and analysis of my GPS tracklogs show that, on average, I am stopped at 5 out of the 23 traffic lights there are on my commute with only 3-4 minutes of stopped time on a 30 minute commute.
It's helped by long sections of nice wide road with few junctions where good progress can be made. The best example of this is Battersea Bridge to Lambeth Bridge (North side of the river) so going along Chelsea Embankment, Grosvenor Road and Millbank, with Cycle Superhighway 8 between Chelsea Bridge and Lambeth Bridge.
[ Sure this is only 14mph (compared to the ~20mph I'd do on the open road) but I'm also on a much heavier bike hauling plenty of clothes/lunch/stuff to and from work. It's still a good workout. The few times I've done it very early or very late I've come a lot closer to 20mph as I'm not slowed up by traffic.
The OPs journey might also be 2/3 rural-ish roads where you can make good progress, say closer to 25mph, and then the last 1/3 of the journey where maintaining that speed without interruption isn't so easy. ]
Mobike was started by an ex-Uber China manager, launched in Shanghai - whereas Ofo had been developed as a bike sharing scheme in universities.
Mobike has GPS enabled, QR unlocked bicycles. Where as Ofo are not GPS enabled and are unlocked with a simple analogue pin code bike lock.
If you want to know more, let me know.
I use both Mobike and Ofo, depending on which is available.
Advantages of Mobike:
- Map-based view of nearby bikes
- Can reserve a bike for 15 mins, whilst you walk to it from wherever you are (good if you're a couple of subway stops away)
- Bikes are plentiful in most places I go
Mobike disadvantages:
- Bikes take some effort to ride, perhaps due to a dynamo and the weight of the electronics
Ofo advantages:
- Bikes are light and easy to ride
Ofo disadvantages:
- Need to wander around to find one, which takes time, even if the app tells you there are some nearby
- Quite common for an Ofo bike to be locked to something using a private chain (i.e. someone has stolen it), and you don't know until you walk up to it
The shaft drive can't help either.
How about always carrying a metal saw with you?
http://publicaddress.net/speaker/shenzens-hire-bike-explosio...
That only works in a hub program if there's a dock next to my office building. (You can count on a dock being next to the train station.) Or I could pay for all-day rental of the bike, when I'm only using it for two ten-minute periods.
In a dockless system, does it actually get any better for my use case?
http://d3nd7i493f0o21.cloudfront.net/assets/resized/img/bike...
And some cities also have their own programs, such as Munich's MVG Rad (E48/year for 30 min per day): https://www.mvg.de/services/mobile-services/mvg-rad.html
Bath Hacked were able to get hold of the NextBike Bath hire data for the scheme. Hire stations even on slight hills had significantly less usage. These bikes are heavy and people that rent them are not used to cycling. Lot of people taking bikes from the station on the hill, but very very few to the station. We also found a huge number of circular rides (back to the same station) i.e. tourists/locals using them for leisure rides.
The following video shows all the rides by hour of day rides are taken excluding circular hires. The station with very few rides is top right ("Sulis"). Note how there are a bunch of drunk students riding them back to halls around 3am in the morning ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfocuESnSg
Even if your city is flat, electric bikes will make a big difference to uptake. The mistake people make is that the people that get the council to implement these schemes are usually keen cyclists and are 'ok' with a bit of strenous cycling. That is not 95% of your potential customer base.
PS: Would be good to see co-bike's hire data at some point and the impact elevation had on hires.
How will you address annoying parking?
I've noticed that people in China really quickly realised how free is "stationless" and you would see those bikes parked in middle of roads, in middle of walking paths, dumped in bushes - just because you can. At one point I saw some foreigner (so not to say only Chinese do it) arrive at Starbucks, stop his bike just in front, lock it and go inside.
I found the idea really great but that kind of overtaking of shared space is quite disturbing.
Spin's bikes will be parked neatly all across the city
Have they arranged appropriate parking places / staging points on private property? Or do they play to just lock bikes to sign poles and streetlamps?
Imagine the visual pollution of thousands of brightly-colored bikes strewn around (or, worse yet, taking up capacity in bike racks that then limits their use for individually-owned bikes).
Many cities have banned random newsracks on public thoroughfares for exactly this reason (including S.F.).
If not, that's five bikes locked up to poles and street signals. What about a hundred?
The difficult part is that these business models seem to actually be really useful, but it would be nice if there was a happy medium between totally skipping out on paying for negative externalities and complete governmental regulation and the ensuing inefficiencies.
As a SF resident, let's say I took a bike home to hayes valley. I'd say there's a 90% chance your bike will get stripped/stolen each night (assuming it's locked well with a good lock) in this area. Would I be liable for this as a user?
Also I can't imagine this would be profitable if there isn't a revolutionary change in theft-prevention. Perhaps it's the GPS component will help discourage thieves?
Stealing and stripping bikes has only 4 reasons 1) selling it 2) selling parts 3) transportation 4) vandalism.
Vandalism is almost impossible to prevent. The other 3 should be preventable by good (and well-known) design. For the bikes to be well known enough you need a large exposure. You can't have just e.g 1000 bikes in SF.
You park your bike and use your phone to "lock it".
Bike locks-in its GPS location. Any attempts to move it will trigger multiple wide-angle/fisheye cameras to start recording and streaming to your phone (also recorded).
Remotely, with your phone, you review the footage. At your command, the bike can call the police to report a theft in progress, and reports its location as quickly as possible in street address/intersection terms.
With another command, built-in loud-speaker also warns passersby that a theft is in progress. The pleasant voice also encourages them to provide additional video coverage of the thief, and (at the user's option) may promise a reward. If the theft is thwarted, then the bike-savoir is can be rewarded (paypal, bitcoin, whatever) by the bike owner, who has seen the whole thing happen on camera, and the bike can use bluetooth/p2p to verify the that the paypal/bitcoin recipient is indeed the person you just saw save your bike.
More fun: at your command, the bike can spray a thick mist of semi-permanent/eventually-washable paint around itself; the exact color shade of the paint spray would always be slightly different in every canister, so one could precisely tie a bike to its thief, if they were perchance apprehended before the getting out of their paint-soiled clothes.
Even more fun: Any/all of these features could also be configured to trigger without any user intervention. For example, if (while locked) the bike detects removal of parts like the seat, wheels, etc., I want it to call the police and emit the paint spray.
At that point, if the bikes were clearly marked as having such technology, and were not super-fancy carbon-fiber bikes but were basic, decent, rideable bikes, then you have what "the club" effect brings to cars -- it becomes obvious that they are not worth the effort, and thieving sticks to non-hardened bikes.
You then get a ratchet-effect, like in a neighborhood with some crime, as soon as one house gets bars on the windows, it won't be long before the whole block does. Get ready for GPS and these kinds of features in every bike. It could be fun, hopefully you can run Linux on these bikes :)
* What kind of thief wants their theft to be video recorded?
* What kind of thief wants a loudspeaker blaring to everyone about their thievery?
* What kind of thief wants to risk getting covered in paint?
Bike 'chop shops' operate in the open, disassembling stolen bikes outside the many tents that line the streets in the Mission district. Here's a good article on the problem: http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/fighting-sfs-mob...
Thieves will use 'angle grinders' to cut bike locks in broad daylight, on busy streets. Here's an example video: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4fcy9y/sparks...
These bikes have an uphill battle before they will survive unmolested in San Francisco, particularly the SOMA/Mission area. I wish them luck!
Thieves are smart and opportunistic. They're less inclined to steal a bike if they know it is being tracked. SFPD in fact have used "bait bikes" on occasion.
Go ahead and keep your attitude of smug resignation, that's entirely your right. I refuse to believe that nothing can be done to combat this rampant problem!
A better approach would be to have locks which open for the users. If the user does not lock up the bike and it is stolen, bam, they get hit with the $1500+ fee to replace the bike just like the existing bike sharing systems.
Locked bikes can still be stolen, but it is a giant leap ahead of just leaving them laying around.
Overall, the system works extremely well and is super convenient, but Shenzhen has very good public transportation to begin with and most of the sidewalks in the city are very wide compared to those in San Francisco. Those are two of the key things that have enabled this type of service to emerge and take off in China--it's really just solving a "last-mile" problem of getting to a point that's too far from a metro station to comfortably walk but not far enough to take a cab.
I tried bike sharing and gave it up because the bikes were poorly maintained and replaced with cheaper bikes (thanks Citibike). Bikes fail, sometimes missing brakes, other times a flat tire.
Why are docking stations important? Because a couple times a week I notice the company pull up with a trailer and maintain the bikes. They swap out the broken ones and fill the stations.
Is Spin going to drive around the city tracking individual bikes to replace them?
Sometimes the brakes are bad, true, but I never pick one with a flat tire (of course checking before I take it out) and I have to say I have gotten tremendous utility from my membership. Sucks to see someone who didn't like it.
I think your last point is pretty devastating and I don't see dockless bike sharing ever reaching the grand scale of something like Citibike.
Since then I've moved to a position where it's cheaper to have my own bike or walk.
The bikes all have a distinct build and color and a Box with a simple touch display and a lock. Even before smartphones you could just text a number and it would send an unlock code. To drop the bike off you'd lock it and call an automated system to give it the displayed confirmation code. That was actually pretty nifty, I liked and used it a lot.
The CCC did a tear down of one of the bikes https://www.ccc.de/en/hackabike
The market for our service wasn't big enough. If you owned the bikes I think it would work better since sizes are consistent, they're easier to brand, etc. That said it's really hard to make money on it when you're competing with publicly subsidized bike shares and VC subsidized ride shares.
Phones still don't work well. It was too easy for the GPS location to be wrong or for users to have phone connectivity problems, causing a lot of frustration. Our service was popular at big events where traffic was bad (eg SXSW) but that's when cell service is the worst. If you rely on phones your users will have problems.
I've lived in China (Beijing and Shanghai) for 6+ years, and have never seen a fire lane.
"And in some cases, towering piles of bikes have cause Chinese cities major headache as they’ve blocked pedestrians, created an eyesore and a possible safety hazard. (Imagine a bike falling from a ten-foot high pile, and landing on your head?)"
What are they talking about? Are they suggesting that riders are parking bikes on top of each other? How did the last rider place their bike on the top of a "ten-foot high pile"? I haven't seen anyone tall enough to do that, in China or anywhere else.
This whole paragraph seems totally made up.
I wonder if cities will allow this competition among bike sharing. Some of these bike programs have big corporate sponsors and the cynical side of me imagines they might have an influence on whether cities allow new entrants to the market.
How could 'Disruptors' violate an agreement to which they're not a party?