Bike share venture in the pink
Walking around Prague these days, you can often come across bright pink bikes parked in the streets. Most of these radiant bicycles belong to Rekola, a non-profit organisation operating a bike sharing scheme in Prague and a number of other cities around the country. The mobile application enables anyone with a smartphone to find the nearest bike and, for a small charge, enjoy a ride through the city.
Vítek Ježek: “We used to travel a lot with my brother around Europe and the great thing about foreign cities in Europe is that each of them has this bike-sharing scheme, so you just enter the city, borrow a bike and cruise around. In a couple of minutes you get from one part of a city to another. And when we got back to Prague we were missing that.
“And then we found out that in Suchdol they had already started a bike sharing project, they put a couple of pink bikes in the streets. It worked pretty well for about two days, but then the bikes got destroyed.
“So my brother and I, we thought about scaling the project so that it would suit a big city and we came up with a cell phone application. This is the system as we know it now.”
And that was two years ago?
VJ: “That was two years ago. We launched a campaign on HitHit and we got some money for a start. In autumn 2013 we started a test run with around fifty people and fifty bikes.
“Initially we thought would be just a community bike-sharing and the community would also repair the bikes but we realised that it wouldn’t be so easy and that we would actually need some repairmen and other services.
“So a year later we launched a full operation, which was also a test run and this year we start test operation number three. We are aiming at having more quality bikes and more quality service.
“The great thing about foreign cities in Europe is that each of them has a bike-sharing scheme, so you just enter the city, borrow a bike and cruise around.”
So how exactly does it work?
Pavlína Pacáková: “It is maybe important to explain the difference from the normal city bikes, Most city bikes services follow a unique template. There are fixed bike stands and you can pick up and return bicycles into these stands.
“But we have no bike stands and you only use your mobile app. You search for the nearest bike and you can leave it wherever you want after using it. So it is very easy.
“And if you don’t have a smartphone you can also use an SMS. You search for the bike on our website. You go there, use an SMS to rent the bike and return it again with an SMS.”
And by sending the SMS, am I also paying for the services?
PP: “No, this is another difference. You are paying for a month or for the whole season, which is seven months, and then you can use the bikes whenever you want.
So how much do you charge for the whole season?
PP: “It is seven hundred crowns for the whole season or 150 a month, but it is not a calendar month, its thirty days.”
How many registered users did you have last year?
VJ: “We started with a big launch and during the first day we acquired around 200 or 250 users which scared us a little so we pushed back the promotion a bit, because we were not sure if we could maintain such a fleet of vehicles and users. But now I think after the year we are ready to go to three thousand users.”
How many bikes have you got and where do you get them?
VJ: “Our bikes are refurbished city bikes that are painted a bright pink colour at community workshops. We get them mainly from people around the Czech Republic, who have them in their cellars, on their balconies and so on.
“If you want to start a bike sharing activity in a city you need to communicate with the local government, you need to hire a place where you build the bike wrecks. But we wanted to start as soon as possible.
“That’s why we don’t use any wrecks and that’s why we don’t buy any new bikes. We think that there are plenty of bikes in every city and village that can still be used. They are not new but they are OK. We have now finished refurbishing them and they are almost as good as new.”
What do you require from the users? There must be some list of rules and regulations.
PP: “Yes, there is a certain zone, because we need to keep the bike in the city centre or around the centre, since we want to see them every other day to check them or repair them. So this is the reason why we have to keep them in one area.
“But many people are using them to travel home and back again. So there is for instance a regulation that if you take the bike out of the zone, you are also asked to bring it back within 24 hours.
“We require them to register and also not to be destructive, lock the bike correctly when leaving it and put the entry into the application.”
“Last year we ended up with twelve hundred registered users and this year we are targeting three thousand.”
VJ: “And when we are talking about locking it properly people should also keep in mind that there are other people using the streets so make sure that the bike is not left standing on a crossroad and so on.”
Who is responsible for the maintenance? It must require quite a lot of people.
PP: “Currently we have around six people who are looking after the bikes. We have other people preparing the bikes in our warehouse and additional three or four working on the application, the PR, social media etc.”
“And it is important to add that now we are talking just about Prague because Rekola is also operating in four other cities: Brno, Pardubice, Hradec Králové and on May 1 we are also launching the app in Olomouc. In these cities it is depending only on the community so the community is still very important for us.”
So are you doing it as a side project or do you actually make a living through Rekola?
PP: “Rekola is now an NGO. So for some of us, for instance for me, as a coordinator of the project, it is part of my living now. But not for all of the people who are hired in it. We are aiming to scale it up and to turn into a social enterprise. So when the project grows it will probably change into this.”
Are there actually any city bikes offered by the city of Prague?
VJ: “There were ambitious projects for at least ten years, but none of them ever covered a wide area of the city. The Town Hall is preparing a new project but I think it will be launched in two years at the earliest.
Have you ever been approached by any of the City Hall councillors to cooperate with them?
VJ: “We actually approached them.”
PP: “We would like to cooperate as much as possible, because we are aiming to have three thousand bikes in Prague this summer. That is a lot of bikes, so we try to cooperate with them, to inform them, as well as the police.
Prague is not regarded as a city keen on cyclists. Would you say the situation has improved over the years?
PP: “Definitely.”
VJ: “It is, but still very slowly. We would like to accelerate this also by getting more people in the streets. The local government must see that there are more and more cyclists to improve the conditions.”
PP: “The Prague municipality has nine million crowns in the budget for cycling this year, so there is definitely a lot of interest and improvement.”
