Mayor confident Mobi won’t mirror Seattle’s doomed bike-share service
Posted January 18, 2017 5:14 pm.
Last Updated January 18, 2017 7:25 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has killed his city’s public bike-sharing service just two-and-a-half years after its launch, but Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is confident he won’t have to do the same thing.
Like Mobi, Seattle’s Pronto system started small, with 500 bikes across 50 stations, mostly in the downtown.
It wasn’t long before membership and revenues started to decline, the service became insolvent, and the city stepped in to take it over. Pronto will be discontinued at the end of March.
“We’ve had the advantage of holding off on launching our bike-share… and being able to learn from many bike-share systems around the world, including Seattle’s,” Robertson says. “We’ve learned some things not to do, and what to do right.”
The mayor argues that Mobi’s launch last fall was much more successful than the Pronto launch. More than 2,800 people purchased annual Mobi memberships during the first two weeks.
“Vancouver is the number one bike city in North America right now, and we’re seeing that kind of support for bike-sharing too,” he adds.
Mobi has seen usage drop during the recent string of cold, snowy weather, but engineering services general manager Jerry Dobrovolny says it still attracted a few hundred riders every day.
