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!).