Fingal exploring “bike libraries” to plug gap from retreat of bike-share services from north of county

Fingal County Council is sizing up different ways to provide bike-share schemes in more rural areas where private operators aren’t viable.

“We are looking at bike libraries, e-bike libraries, that sort of stuff to make it a bit more sustainable,” said Stephen McGinn, at the Balbriggan-Rush-Lusk-Swords Area Committee meeting on 16 January.

“We haven’t abandoned the North County bike share,” said McGinn, the council’s walking and cycling officer.

Social Democrats Councillor Paul Mulville had put forward a motion calling for the reinstatement of bike-share schemes in several coastal towns – Donabate, Portane, Rush, Lusk, and Balbriggan.

Bleeper used to offer shared bikes in these towns. But in September, the company signed a new contract with the council that included plans for more bikes overall in the county, but covering fewer areas.

This followed the complete withdrawal of Tier – which had been running an e-bike-share scheme in Fingal – on foot of high operating costs and levels of vandalism, said McGinn.

But it isn’t all over for shared e-bikes in Fingal either, said McGinn. “We are actively working with other providers to try to reintroduce e-bikes to Fingal.”

Using them

At the area meeting, Mulville, the Social Democrats councillor, said his impression had been that the Bleeper scheme was popular.

It was helping get people out of cars and was handy for short journeys, he said. “From Lusk out to the train station, or from Donabate down to Portrane.”

Tom O’Leary, a Fine Gael councillor, said he knew of an Erasmus student from Germany who had used a Bleeper bike for one leg of her commute from Skerries to a nursing home in Gormanstown.

“It’s a great scheme for something like that,” O’Leary said. But the bikes had disappeared from outside Eurospar in Skerries, he said.

McGinn, the council’s cycling and walking officer, said the figures showed that just not enough people were hopping on the bikes for Bleeper to stick with it.

From September to November last year, there were 617 trips from 70 bikes across the local electoral area, he said. That’s roughly 7.5 trips a day.

To be viable, Bleeper needs somewhere between one or two trips per bike per day, he said. “We’re miles off that at the moment.”

In Blanchardstown, they counted 2,253 journeys from 30 bikes, said McGinn. “So you can see the demand there is much higher – and still not ideal, we’re working to make that better.”

The new operational plan that the council had agreed with Bleeper does leave a gap in the north county, said McGinn. But the company has been able to amp up overall, he said.

Bleeper now has 150 bikes on streets rather than 125, and has launched a “Fingal Pass” giving customers the first 30 minutes of every journey free of charge.

Kieran Ryan, the communications and marketing manager for Bleeper, said that in discussions with the council, they had focused on problem solving.

They looked at where they could get the most bikes out for the most trips, he said. “So that you wouldn’t have bikes that are doing less than one trip a day and sitting on a pavement most of the day.”

Hence the focus on west Dublin, like Blanchardstown and Castleknock, and south Fingal, the likes of Howth and Portmarnock, he said.

The service north of the Malahide Estuary just wasn’t efficient, he said. It was quite weather-dependent, with people using the bikes to go to the beach for a swim but not so much for commutes and regular trips.

Putting the bikes where they will be used more is not just about the economics, he said.

“When you look at it from a carbon accounting perspective, you’re avoiding more carbon.”

Filling the gap

On Monday, a spokesperson for the council said that when it came to bike libraries, it had one in mind as a model.

“The Active Travel Unit are looking at ways to replicate the success of the Ongar Bike Library in areas of the North County where commercial bike share has proved difficult to sustain,” said the spokesperson.

The council has piloted that library at the Ongar Community Centre, in partnership with Bleeper and University College Dublin, they said. The library has e-bikes, cargo bikes and longtail bikes, the council spokesperson said.

“Successful applicants are given a free 3 month trial, which gives them a realistic understanding of how an eBike would fit into their daily routine and hopefully lead to them adopting more sustainable travel patterns,” they said.

Ryan, of Bleeper, said he also sees bike libraries as playing a role in plugging the gap. “The idea behind that is that you get the bike and there’s literally no catches.”

Another option would be a programme similar to the LeaseBike scheme Bleeper has, where people lease an e-bike and get maintenance included, for a weekly fee of €20 or €25.

“There’s a model where the local authority could potentially subsidise that for people for a number of months, so that they can try out an e-bike,” he says.

There’s a scheme in Paris funded by the city, where people can apply for long-term loans of an e-bike or cargo-bike and then get a grant at the end to buy one, he says. “Those are the kinds of things that could help to plug the gap.”

An alternative also is that you take a town like Balbriggan and treat it as a project in itself, Ryan says.

“You’d have to sort of load that with bikes to such an extent that people are using them, that they’re sort of anywhere you go in Balbriggan, there’s a bike you can use,” he says.

Bleeper couldn’t afford to take on the risk of trying out 100 bikes in Balbriggan though, he said. “That would be something that you probably couldn’t expect any commercial bike-sharing operator to go into.”

That kind of push would need council support, he says.