Talking Smart Cities — E-Bikes Sharing with Bewegen Technologies
Behind the scenes of one of the companies changing the game
Will e-bike sharing change the way we move forever?
At the Velocity 2021 conference in Lisbon, BABLE had the opportunity to discuss micromobility, bike-sharing and e-bikes with Mario Carrier, CEO of Bewegen and Martijn Kentie, International Development Lead at Bewegen.
Below, we share with you the summary of our insightful conversation and a brief overview of Bewegen Technologies. A look into Bewegen’s work reveals the revolutionising industry of e-mobility and shared active mobility.
What is Bewegen Technologies and what do they do?
Bewegen is based in Canada, with 12–15 people on the management and business side, but also with an IT team, manufacturers and operators in France, Portugal as well as in Canada, with around a hundred employees.
The company was founded in 2013 by Alain Ayotte, who worked to develop a flexible vehicle-sharing system in Montreal. In its first two years, the company was dedicated to developing a 100% new electric bike for bike-sharing. The objectives at the time were thus to manufacture the bike, but also to operate it.
Mario Carrier, CEO of the company since 2019:
We are the operators of many bike-sharing networks, but we also support municipalities and cities to do operate their networks by themselves.
Martijn Kentie added:
When we have clients who want to operate by themselves, we train them. And we give them the technical and day-to-day assistance that’s necessary
With its next-generation electric-assisted bicycles, Bewegen aims to be the missing link in urban mobility: a clean-energy, multiuser system of vehicles that provides the most efficient personal transportation experience. The standard bike can be customised to each client’s needs: cup holder, phone holder, and more.
We have this advantage as a company to manufacture our own bikes. I just turn around and say to the designer ‘this client wants to have a luggage holder at the back, is this possible?’
The company is as committed to sustainability as to the quality, as their bikes are built to last longer than the average shared bike.
It’s the question of the values of the company: are we there for short-term cash flow or are we there for a long-term solution? If we were just looking for money, we would be building a cheaper bike that would only last for the next three years”, said Mario Carrier. “The choice that we made was to build something sustainable. We just re-signed an operation contract of 5 years: at the end of our contract, bikes will have a 10-year operational period in front of them
Where will Bewegen be in a few years?
In Mario Carrier’s opinion, the bike-sharing market will continue to evolve in the years to come, the needs of large cities where you can operate around ten thousand bikes being already quite different from the needs of a smaller city where you can implement about a thousand bikes network. Consequently, business models will depend on the size of the cities implementing a bike-sharing network.
We are already seeing a difference: big companies such as Lime or Uber are not interested in small towns.
The CEO of Bewegen believes that smaller cities will need to first put in place a regional network, before moving on to a specific network for themselves:
A network for a group of municipalities is good for tourists because the same membership is available in various places and, it’s good for local people who commute to nearby municipalities. That will be good for everyone.
The future thus seems to lie in the capacity of having two business models ready to be adapted depending on the size of the city and the tourist development of the region.
For example, there is a place in Utah where tourism during summer is very high, and it totally changes the approach the cities will have. We must consider that.
What are currently the main challenges in the bike-sharing market?
While expanding its operations to Europe, the company has experienced several resistance points, the first being the difficulty of importing and exporting equipment. Mario Carrier explained:
In Europe, I find it smart to work with local partners, when in the US I don’t need that.
While understanding that a country will always prioritise its own companies to support employment, he insisted on the fact that you cannot develop a global solution such as Bewegen’s that way and restated that the need to export was vital.
On the other hand, Bewegen’s experience in the US market is that people have fewer personal bikes, while it is easier in Europe to respond to a need.
To be sure to provide a good service at the end of the day, we must evaluate all opportunities and risks of specific areas.
What is the best feature of Bewegen’s bikes?
With the Dyname Electric Motor powering their e-bikes, one of their best features is the way electronic assistance adjusts automatically to the user.
One of the main user pain points identified by Bewegen is the fact that you must change mode, or you must press buttons to get extra or lower assistance, and that if you are already on the highest assistance level when coming up a hill, then you still have to put more effort into pedalling.
“We decided we wanted to make it intuitive. So that the bike listens in some way to the user, and that the user doesn’t know he needs more assistance, because it’s automatic,” explained Martijn Kentie.
“I tend to compare it to when you’re using cruise control in your car: you know you’re going to be at 90 km/hour until you turn it up or you until you brake. And it’s the same with our bikes.”
More than a bike
Want to read about real-world implementations from Bewegen? Find them on the BABLE platform!
Co-authors from BABLE Smart Cities
