This week’s glorious multipack of all things e-bike has a vague theme: the battle for the pavement. Lime is offering “valets” for US e-bike riders, Voi wants operators to unite, and NYC is bringing charging units to the city’s sidewalks.
Lime expands North American e-bike provisions for FIFA World Cup
The FIFA World Cup kicked off in Mexico yesterday with an opening ceremony featuring singers Shakira and Andrea Bocelli, and actress Salma Hayek. Somewhat less glamourously, micromobility operator Lime has announced a major fleet expansion of 14,000 new e-bikes and e-scooters across North American World Cup host cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, LA, and Monterrey, to mitigate traffic congestion.
The fruity e-bike operator is also offering flat-rate 90-minute passes for $15, presumably so that the non-football fans among us can go for a nice bike ride instead of watching the match. To prevent parking chaos, Lime is introducing specialized infrastructure, as well as “Lime valets” in some cities.
”By offering a more predictable way to ride during one of the busiest travel stretches of the year, Lime is helping people spend less time worrying about how to get around and more time enjoying the summer of soccer,” the company says.
Could London e-bike operators unite to prevent bad parking?
On the subject of e-bike parking, the BBC reported that London Assembly Member Elly Baker has urged Transport for London to create a city-wide regulatory framework for dockless e-bike operators to mitigate issues with nuisance parking — and e-bike operators are on-board with this idea.
“City Hall’s call for TfL to use new devolved powers to create a single, city wide framework for shared e-bikes reflects what operators have been saying for some time – the current patchwork system isn’t working,” said Christina Moe Gjerde, VP of Northern Europe at Voi. “Many of the issues Londoners see and experience today are symptoms of a fragmented system.”
E-bike parking is becoming a hugely contentious issue in most cities, and a big part of the problem in London is that rules aren’t the same across boroughs. In Islington, for instance, you can park your e-bike anywhere as long as it’s not obstructing pedestrians (although you should park in a dedicated zone). However, if you cross the border into neighbouring Camden, you must park in a bay, which can cause confusion, especially as everyone in Camden seems to be drunk most of the time.
Where designated parking bays exist, they can become overcrowded with e-bikes and e-scooters from different operators that use different systems to allocate space. Uniting the framework among operators could mitigate these issues and make the city’s pavements just a little bit tidier and less hazardous for vulnerable users.
> Barcelona to ban private bike share schemes from 2027, as mayor slams e-bike parking “mess”
New York leads charge on sidewalk battery cabinets
Back in the USA, where New York’s Department of Transport (DOT) is facing another battle on the pavements, or sidewalks in the local parlance. Back in March, DOT announced plans to introduce charging cabinets on New York City streets to allow delivery riders to swap dead batteries for full ones.
It’s actually a great idea — moving batteries out of the Big Apple’s crowded apartments could help mitigate the 900+ fires and 30+ deaths since 2022 that have been linked to unsafe charging. However, the scheme is facing pushback from residents, as I Love the Upper West Side’s Mike Mishkin reports, with attendees of a recent meeting questioning whether the cabinets should be positioned near a public school.
The bigger question, as Mishkin points out, is why delivery companies are dodging the bill for this vital and potentially life-saving infrastructure.”By one committee member’s math, the state is putting up about $125,000 per cabinet and the city is supplying the sidewalk, while the workers themselves would pay a monthly membership fee — running around $70 at the private battery-swap sites already operating in the city,” says Mishkin. “The apps that dispatch those workers, multiple speakers noted with frustration, are slated to pay nothing.”
Yamaha tunes up e-bikes with OTA update
Could Yamaha become the new Bosch? After acquiring the similarly named Brose’s e-bike subsidiary last year, the Japanese musical instrument and motorbike manufacturer has been expanding into Europe. Now, it’s following Bosch into OTA updates for its Qore drive units that unlock power. Drive³ Peak units will be boosted from 600W to 800W peak power, and 95Nm to 105Nm torque, and Drive³ Power goes from 500W to 700W peak power, and 80Nm to 90Nm torque.
“With over-the-air updates, the QORE system instantly becomes significantly more user-friendly,” says Lionel Sternberg, Product Manager for Software Architecture at Yamaha Motor eBike Systems. “This enables us to provide all conceivable updates – such as new features, security updates, or bug fixes – as downloads in our app.”
