Uber Now In Bike-Sharing Business

Ride-hailing service Uber is piloting a new venture in San Francisco alongside dockless bike-sharing startup Jump.

Uber Bike has launched in San Francisco, through a partnership with Jump- a dockless, electric bike-sharing startup. Jump became the first company to operate a dockless bike-sharing program in the city when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency issued an 18 month permit beginning today. Jump has teamed up with Uber to roll out this new bike-share service called Uber Bike.

Initially, 250 bikes will be available around San Francisco. Users can rent these pedal-assist electric bikes for $2 for the first 30 minutes and an additional per-minute fee thereafter. While only 250 bikes are available now, SFMTA may allow an additional 250 bikes to join the Uber Bike fleet within nine months. Because this is a dockless system, the bikes can be left wherever it’s legal to park a bike within Uber Bike’s service area.

“We’re always kind of searching for options to make transportation affordable and more accessible for people,” Andrew Salzberg, Uber’s head of transportation policy, told TechCrunch. “It fits into this larger vision, we think, that there can be multiple modes of transportation that can be made available through the Uber app. There are lot of places where there are many trips that it’s probably going to be quicker and cheaper to hop on a bike. Strategically, it makes a lot of sense for us as a business.”

As Uber evolves as a company, capturing more modes of transportation within the sharing economy seems like a logical progression. “It fits into this larger vision, we think, that there can be multiple modes of transportation that can be made available through the Uber app,” Salzberg said. “There are a lot of places where there are many trips that it’s probably going to be quicker and cheaper to hop on a bike. Strategically, it makes a lot of sense for us as business. There’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic about how bikes fit into the vision of shared mobility on demand. ”

Images: Jump/Uber