Can these self-charging e-bike libraries bring mobility to low-income communities?

Buying an e-bike is expensive. Starting last year, a local startup provides low-cost, self-charging e-bike libraries to low-income communities in eastern Massachusetts, Next City reports.

Funded by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center as part of a three-year pilot, the Cambridge-based company Metro Mobility provides income-qualified residents with an e-bike for as low as $1 per day.

Working directly with cities, housing authorities, and non-profit housing providers, the company installs e-bike docks for residents who live in subsidized housing and low-income communities.

There are currently 85 docks in 10 communities across Boston, its Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods, and the nearby cities of Medford, Malden, Quincy, and Lawrence.

Users can rent an e-bike for the day and return it to the same location to charge. That means that a user can ride to work, stop by the grocery store and visit friends before docking the bike—unlike with traditional bike-share, where bikes are docked at the end of each trip.

So far, 480 users have ridden a combined 32,706 miles, with 79% of users reporting demographic information identifying as low-income.

How Metro Mobility Works

While some bike share systems have self-charging docks—Pittsburgh debuted new e-bikes and charging docks for POGOH in 2022 and New York’s Citi Bike just added charging docks in May—bikes in Metro Mobility’s program can be locked anywhere with the charging cable.

“The beauty of our program is also, if you work somewhere where there’s no station, it doesn’t matter,” says Metro Mobility CEO David Montague.

Montague got his start in the bike industry decades ago, designing a full-size folding bike. In 2015, his company launched Park&Pedal, a program providing free parking to commuters who decide to bike the last few miles to work, relieving congestion in the busiest parts of the city.

“People loved the program, but the complaint was always—it’s a BYOB program, ‘bring your own bike.'”

When Montague started looking into adding bike share stations to Park&Pedal locations, he found it cost-prohibitive. So he developed a new kind of self-charging e-bike dock using ChargeLock technology: One cable to both charge and lock an e-bike or e-scooter.

Traditional bike share systems require workers to swap out and charge dead batteries, making up the bulk of operation costs. Montague says that Metro Mobility docks can be installed at a fraction of the cost of traditional bike docks. To unlock a bike, customers use a smartphone and a QR code.

“We are much more Tesla Supercharger-ish,” he says. “All we have is a cable. We don’t have a kiosk.”

The dock costs about $100 per bike, not including installation. Cost savings mean that cities can provide e-bike rentals to low-income residents for as little as $1 per day. Non-income-qualified users pay $1 to start and $0.15 per minute for a maximum cost of $12 per day.

There are security features built into the system, including an alarm that goes off if a bike is jostled while docked.

‘Those Are Our Bikes’

As part of its outreach process, Metro Mobility enlists people in the community to spread the word.

While there was initially some “light” vandalism, Montague says that overall, that hasn’t been an issue. In some cases, people must live in the building where the dock is located to use the system.

“So people know, those are our bikes. We’re not going to destroy them, because they’re there for us. And the cost is so minimal that this is not somebody coming in and trying to make money.”

The e-bike libraries provide affordable access to an e-bike without the costs and hassles of ownership, says Metro Mobility.

The program was developed so that low-income residents who can’t afford to purchase an electric vehicle can also take advantage of climate incentives. For example, Massachusetts’ Mor-EV program offers rebates of up to $6,000 to purchase an EV.

E-bikes, meanwhile, are the often unsung heroes of climate-friendly transportation, with a much smaller energy footprint than EVs and emitting fewer polluting tire particles.

“Our roads aren’t getting any bigger; our populations are,” says Montague. “Transportation has to get smaller and more efficient in order to fit. And so we think e-bikes make a whole lot of sense going forward, over and above electric cars.”

This story was produced through Next City’s Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This story was produced by Next City, a nonprofit newsroom covering solutions for equitable cities, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.