Anyone looking to pedal their way from one part of Nanaimo to another will soon be able to hop on an emission-free shared e-bike.
The city wants to establish alternative transportation modes for people to get around town and one way to achieve that is to make shareable electric bikes available for public use.
At a governance and priorities committee meeting Monday, Feb. 12, Sadie Robinson, city active transportation project specialist, presented an update on the e-bike share pilot program that is scheduled to start in May.
“Establishing access to alternate modes of transportation, such as e-bike share, supports active and sustainable transportation and desired outcomes of the city plan, including increasing the shares of trips made by active modes and reducing the distance driven per person per day,” she said.
Evolve E-Bike Share, created by BCAA, which also operates electric car share programs, has e-bike share programs running in Whistler, New Westminster, and Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus. The company approached the city in 2023 about setting up a public bike share program in Nanaimo, which is aiming for all trips within the city to be zero carbon-emitting by 2050, and struck a deal. A one-week launch promotion will allow the public to try the service at reduced cost or for free, and once established, the e-bike share trial will remain in place for the remainder of the year. Robinson said staff will report back to council at the end of the year with data, and seek direction on whehter to continue with e-bike sharing.
Bike share station locations are still being worked out, but will be concentrated in primary and secondary urban centres within the city, such as downtown, near Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, Vancouver Island University and shopping centres, along the city’s active mobility routes and near transit nodes such as Regional District of Nanaimo Transit exchanges. The company has a companion app for payment and station and bike locations and its staff will be responsible for repairing the bikes, maintaining the stations, sanitizing helmets, swapping batteries and redistributing the bikes where they’re needed. Evolve and the city are also still working out where space can be acquired to maintain the fleet.
Coun. Ben Geselbracht said he is “super pleased” to see the program materialize. He has tried an electric bike share program in Vancouver and discussed a program being promoted by an Ontario-based e-bike operation at a trade show there.
“I used the bike quite a lot over there, the Shaw Mobility bikes, and it was a really effective way to get around,” Geselbracht said. “There was another company at the trade show and I asked them what their experience was having these e-bikes in town and vandalism … They said that all the components on the bike are proprietary, so you can’t sell them anywhere, they’re geo-tracked, and they said that after about a two- or three-month adjustment period, they had very little challenges around that and I’m hoping that’s what we’ll see here.”
Robinson said factors affecting continuation of the program beyond the end of 2024 will be determining how many Evolve staff will be required to maintain the bikes and how much uptake of the service there is in Nanaimo, which will help Evolve determine if the service is profitable enough for the company to carry on the service locally.
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