Around town in the last few weeks you may have noticed some small black and green bikes with sig­nage on them. These turn out to have been set free on the town by Mighty Share (a.k.a. MTShare), Wellington’s (if not New Zealand’s) first dock­less bike shar­ing scheme.

MTShare bikes
These kinds of bike-shar­ing schemes have got­ten very big over­seas, very quick­ly: instead of being tied to spe­cial stands, the hire bikes are just scat­tered around the town and may be unlocked by a any poten­tial rid­er who has a mobile phone and an account with the bike share scheme.

The idea first orig­i­nat­ed in Chi­na and has spread to many oth­er coun­tries in the last six months or so, not always with uni­form­ly pos­i­tive results.

Here in Welling­ton though, the launch is a bit small­er, with 18 bikes of a fair­ly basic qual­i­ty, but at least equipped with a wide range of gears as befit­ting our land­scape. At the moment usage of the ser­vice is free; and hel­mets are pro­vid­ed (though this lat­ter point is not with­out a cer­tain ick-fac­tor, YMMV).

MTShare app viewTo use a bike you first need to reg­is­ter your­self on the MTShare app (iOS and Android ver­sions, nat­u­ral­ly; and odd­ly the con­fir­ma­tion code comes from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent domain that also hosts a poet­ry web­site).

Each bike has an ID num­ber attached to it; and you enter this num­ber into the app to receive the code for the com­bo lock. You tap an onscreen but­ton in the app to “start” your ride, and again to “stop” your ride; with your last GPS co-ordi­nate becom­ing the loca­tion used for the bike so the next poten­tial rid­er can find the bike on the app’s map.

The bikes them­selves are quite ride­able, though small, and the seats aren’t eas­i­ly adjustable. I am not a big per­son but I found the seat too low to be com­fort­able — it’s doubt­ful that any­one over about 175cm is going to find these very prac­ti­cal to ride. And on the bike I tried the dri­ve­train was a bit rat­tly and not ter­ri­bly smooth run­ning.

But for a quick dash from the library (I was late get­ting back to work after lunch!), across the water­front to the near­est bike rack close to work it went quite well — but I’m not sure if I’d take the bike on the road unless I have a tool to raise the seat a bit.

This all raised a few ques­tions for me so I got in con­tact with Edward, one of the own­ers of the scheme, and asked him (quite) a few ques­tions.

Did you build the app plat­form your­self, or did you buy it in?

MTSHARE was designed and devel­oped in-house. We spent months study­ing sim­i­lar apps from around the world, adding the good bits to our app to cre­ate a prod­uct that we believe is easy on the eye and easy to use.

How will you avoid some of the prob­lems seen over­seas?

First of all, we think it’s unlike­ly that we have such heat­ed com­pe­ti­tion here in New Zealand. Sec­ond­ly, we cur­rent­ly lack the funds to flood New Zealand streets with thou­sands of bikes. 🙂 Third­ly and most impor­tant­ly, we believe organ­ic growth based on demand and pub­lic accep­tance is health­i­er than crowd­ing streets with bikes, as aware­ness of our ser­vice grows we will work with local busi­ness­es and coun­cils to roll­out more bikes.

Cur­rent­ly the ser­vice is free. When do you plan to start charg­ing? 

We will try our very hard­est to keep the ser­vice free. We are work­ing with local busi­ness­es to keep this ser­vice sus­tain­able and com­mer­cial­ly viable. The next batch of MTSHARE bikes will be brand­ed.

What hap­pens if there’s a tech­ni­cal issue with a bike?

The iOS app has a Report Issue func­tion where the user can select from a list of issues and send us a mes­sage. A user can con­tact us from inside the app on the Android ver­sion. We have plans to add func­tion­al­i­ties for a user to rate the pre­vi­ous user’s behav­ior.

The bikes are quite small.  Will you be get­ting bikes that are big­ger and more adjustable? 

The next batch will be 26-inch with adjustable seats. (Note: in a lat­er email Edward men­tioned the sup­pli­er was hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty with the adjustable seats, but he did say that the next batch would have bas­kets, which was anoth­er fea­ture I thought would be a good thing.)

What’s your opin­ion about hel­mets? Do you think that hav­ing to pro­vide hel­mets for your rid­ers is a good or bad thing? 

Health and safe­ty is our num­ber one pri­or­i­ty hence every bike comes with a hel­met. As peo­ple become more aware and famil­iar with our ser­vice, they can choose to use their own hel­met or ours.

Why are some bike icons in the app blue and oth­ers green? 

The green ones are avail­able bikes. The blue (yel­low on Android) ones are cur­rent­ly in use. If you found blue bikes not in use, it means the last user for­got to fin­ish the trip in the app.

Last­ly, one of the attrac­tions for the big big schemes over­seas is the loca­tion data that can be col­lect­ed on peo­ple. What do you do with the data you col­lect on MTShare users?

Not sure yet. That’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing we can think about in the future. How­ev­er, we don’t have enough bikes to accu­mu­late enough data.  The data shows there are already some reg­u­lar users who ride our bikes to work almost every day, so we are very excit­ed! We’ve been in con­tact with the Welling­ton City Coun­cil. We hope our data can assist their urban plan­ning and we will add func­tion­al­i­ties to let users to reg­is­ter request for bike racks.

Thanks to Edward for being so accom­mo­dat­ing of all my ques­tions.

This is a nice, low-key start to this kind of bike shar­ing in Welling­ton. It’s true that oth­er more expen­sive sys­tems over­seas have blue­tooth con­nec­tions to the bikes; onboard GPS; spe­cial­ly built extra robust frames with unflat­table tyres etc etc but Edward and his co-own­ers have tried to take a slight­ly more mod­est tack, at least ini­tial­ly.

Mean­while, I’m look­ing for­ward to try­ing some of the larg­er mod­el bikes that are com­ing (stow­ing the pro­vid­ed hel­met in the bas­ket and using my own!).