Talking Smart Cities — Bike Parking with Bikeep
At the Velocity 2021 conference in Lisbon, I had the opportunity to discuss micromobility, parking, and biking with Kristjan Lind, CEO of Bikeep. Below, I share with you the summary of our insightful conversation and a short overview of Bikeep.
After discussing the recent year’s micromobility boom, we dove into the subject of urban mobility evolution and how Bikeep positions itself among public transportation, walking, and ride-hailing in urban areas.
What is Bikeep and what do they do?
“The mission of Bikeep is to enable more micromobility and to give the chance to cyclists to use their own bike safely. We want to enable this through smart and safe infrastructure, as easy as possible!” — Kristjan Lind
Bikeep serves as an intermediary between the micromobility users (citizens using shared bikes and e-bikes, or e-scooters) and the community managers (municipality, campus, etc…). By providing infrastructure components such as bike parking stations, e-bike charging stations, e-scooter parking, and smart lockers — all connected with their IoT — Bikeep enables an increase in active urban mobility.
Bikeep’s parking products support multimodal parking in some cases (bikes and e-scooters) and only bikes or only e-scooters in others, depending on the product. Thus, the users can check the availability of the dock locations (where and when they can park) and the price, if applicable (most of the cases not).
An easy-to-use app helps users check the availability of parking, time of parking, who can park and what type of vehicles can be parked. And community managers can independently manage the infrastructure available through Bikeep as they wish.
“What we give to the community managers is the ability of easy control and insight. To the cyclists users we facilitate parking and security for their vehicles” — Kristjan Lind
Who are Bikeep’s target customers? And who do they work with?
Clients for Bikeep are diverse and may include entities such as transit agencies, municipalities, campuses (university and corporate), real estate agencies, shopping centres, and even car parking operators. Curiously, a large majority of their deals are B2B.
Currently, in Tallin, Estonia, Bikeep operates over 1000 of the docking stations, of which more than 90% are funded by commercial companies — shopping centres and real estate developers are the biggest customers. The municipality was the initiator, and then the private sector followed the trend due to user demand. Today, one of the biggest privately-owned smart-cities in Northern Europe, Ülemiste City, is using Bikeep to fulfill its goals of becoming car-free by 2030.
“Groceries stores want to attract more traffic; commercial real estate agencies want to get rid of the car parking. This is the real motivation!” — Kristjan Lind
How much does it cost?
For the client, one pilot is around 1000 EUR per dock, i.e. a single parking lock for one bike. The e-scooter docks are similar but slightly cheaper. Nevertheless, the costs work with the economies of scale model, decreasing with the further implementation of more stations.
For the user, the charging and parking in Bikeep are usually free. In a few cases, the cyclist pays per use or hour and in the Canadian Translink case, the secure lockers use pay as you go or monthly subscriptions. How and if the parking and charging are billed, is up to the Bikeep client, be it the municipality, real estate company, shop and so on. Kristjan said —
“In Vancouver, Canada, TransLink was managing parking systems with mechanical keys — citizens would have to contact the agency and receive this key in cases they wanted to use the system. But now with our system, everything is automated and much more efficient, making it cheaper in the long run.”
The Bikeep story
Kristjan is the CEO and founder of Bikeep, and the company was founded and began operating in Tallin, Estonia, in 2013. Their main office is in Tallin, and they also have a sales office in San Francisco, USA, with the first USA implementations beginning in 2017.
During the first years of Bikeep, the focus was on product development “to get it going” and the company was mostly self-funded from sales of equipment. In September, an investment round of 3M USD to continue building a strong presence in the US, was closed.
During the initial years between 2013–2017, the goal was focused on developing the product and answering key questions such as — Who is the target customer? Where is the value for them? (…)
“First we were focusing on cyclists, but it took us a bit of time to see that the municipalities, campus managers, transit agencies — they would be our clients. The challenges with these clients are that the sales cycles take longer, and you can even take months to know about lack of success.
The company started in 2013, but in 2017 we increased our efforts, raised the first funding round and really kicked it off. At the beginning, this was a product development project for us, our business model was based on sales of bicycle infrastructure — we sold regular racks, shelters, these things… But now it is very different! We are developing smart cities and making a real impact in people’s lives.”
Fun facts!
- Parking with ID cards
Initially, Bikeep wanted to pair the bike parking functionality with the new Estonian ID card, taking advantage of Estonia's advance of digitalization. The idea was that people would park their bikes with their Estonian ID cards. Awesome right?
“But the Estonian ID is only Estonian right? So, our Total Addressable Market was 1.2 million people, and out of that, the cyclists were only 12 thousand — we needed something else for more countries. So, we developed the mobile app to enable the same thing globally!” Kristjan explains.
2. Parking via phone calls
In 2014–2016, there was a phone number at each station. Users would call it and the booking system would automatically allocate a dock to them. It would play a message that said, for example, “dock number 3 has been allocated for your bike”. Then, when the cyclist would come back to retrieve their bike, the same could be done. Before the app, this solution was welcomed warmly and it served its purpose extremely well.
“In some cases, we might even re-introduce it for inclusiveness. The goal is to not exclude anyone without a smartphone!” — Kristjan Lind
Want to read more about micromobility implementations? Find them on the BABLE platform!
Make sure to also take a look at our other mobility-related Medium articles, and always feel free to reach out to us for any inquiry.
