My new friend Onzo
I made a new friend! They’re black and yellow and flawed but I love them already. Their name is onzo and there are hundreds of them in Aucklands CBD and they are a dockless bikeshare bike and also my new best friend.
Onzo popped up last night without warning to anyone (including AT/Council it seems. I approve because I too have conveniently forgotten to tell AT about activities concerning them). Dockless bike share means onzo can be parked anywhere and unlocked with an app. It’s very popular in China and startups have raised the type of funding that makes you think capitalism is unfixably broken.
The bikes are lil step throughs with one (very easy) gear, a big seat and a basket. They have a helmet (mandatory) and no lights (probably bad?). The helmet is not attached to the bike so how long they stick around is anyone’s guess. My guess is not long but I’m the type of person that steals free chopsticks from St Pierre’s.
I wanted to try out the now ubiquitous (between Aotea and Quay street) bikes that had a small corner of twitter (hi guys!) ablaze so I did.
The app is really good! Like surprisingly, suspiciously good. It has a map with all the bikes locations, tracks your distance, including calories burned and carbon saved. Most shockingly it all seems to work. They wanted my debit card and phone number and location and name and email and camera permissions so I gave it to them because I wanted the new shiny thing.
They took a $10 deposit and gave me $10 credit. It costs 25c for 15 minutes (a dollar an hour) which is outrageously cheap. Next Bike, the current waterfront based bikeshare service run by nice people, costs $4 an hour.
I took the shared streets from Freyberg square down to the Quay Street cycleway, through Wynyard and the West Haven shared path and under the bridge. I planned to leave the bike under the bridge in a nod to Skypath and walk up the hill to bus home.
This may be a result of the weather , happy dogs I saw, and experiencing some of Aucklands only passable bike infrastructure but I’m totally on board for these bikes.
They are the definition of cheap and cheerful. They have a bell that goes off by accident and you couldn’t go fast on them if you tried. They feel solid enough but are suprisingly light. People kept looking at me which I assume is because of the bell and bright yellow and black bike not the dumb smile I had on.
By the time I got to the bridge I couldn’t bring myself to abandon my new friend there, so I (with the meter running! I was paying for the pleasure) pushed the bike up the hill to Herne bay. If you are a person who enjoys exercise or are determined you could probably make it up on the bike but I am neither.
Riding on the road through Ponsonby was less fun, because Ponsonby road is a horrible place to be on a bike at all times.
I left onzo outside Golden Dawn (in front of ads for an app AT have made for people to park easier I guess?). I had the bike for 45 minutes and it cost me one (1) dollar. The bus I took to take me the rest of the way home from one end of Richmond to the other cost nearly twice that.
There is no way every or any experience of Onzo will be as fun as mine. O bikes (same deal as onzo but Australian and therefore worse) in Melbourne have caused lots of consternation and bike backlash which is bad. Hopefully that can be avoided here! Probably not! I got off the bus outside a shop in grey lynn that has just had a fancy new bus stop with a bike detour built in front of it, and the parking moved across the road. There is this sign, which made me sad.
Some of the backlash seems easy to mitigate. There seem to be no restrictions on where I could leave them, not that I tried very hard. Some services use geofencing to constrain the area you can lock the bikes, but there is no warning of that from onzos app. Most services have trucks to redistribute the bikes, which onzo might have, no one knows anything! There is another bikeshare coming in before the end of the year that has been working with council and has those things.
What onzo does have is bikes in the city now you can ride for an hour for the cost of a gold coin (plus a smartphone and data). We need more people on bikes in this city, and hopeful this will help.
