In March 2016, Long Beach introduced their public bike share system. In 2017, our team took over operations of the 500-bicycle fleet. We successfully hired new staff, created brand new operating procedures, revised the maintenance and rebalancing protocols, and updated the system to current industry standards.
The following year, Pedal Movement won the bid for the program and immediately began overhauling the underperforming system. We performed a system audit, analyzing BikeShare usage data across the entire system. This audit led to system-wide changes such as relocating under-utilized hubs and redistributing bicycles to popular areas in order to increase accessibility. We improved system health by increasing our maintenance and cleaning frequency, as well as revamping the network’s rebalancing strategy. We integrated Long Beach BikeShare into all of our existing Long Beach services—for example, we included available BikeShare bicycles at bike valets, educational events, and the transportation hub in Downtown.
Since 2017, Pedal Movement has worked with the City to nearly double the geographic reach of Long Beach’s bike share network. One of our major goals since taking over bike share operations has been to expand the network to include underserved communities in North Long Beach. Due to industry limitations when we took over the system, however, we were not able to purchase equipment that would integrate with the greater Long Beach system.
This remained a problem until 2019 when the City of Long Beach and Pedal Movement identified a solution. We facilitated the purchase of more than 75 bicycles from a local Social Bicycles system that had recently shuttered and began dismantling, repainting, and refurbishing the bicycles. Later that year, the City and Pedal Movement officially launched a subsystem in North Long Beach utilizing refurbished bicycles that would have otherwise gone to waste. Using Mobility Cloud, these bikes integrated seamlessly into the greater Long Beach Bike Share system.
Despite industry-wide challenges, the City of Long Beach wanted to continue to grow its system size but was limited due to equipment availability. At the beginning of this year amidst varying Coronavirus shutdowns we, along with the City of Long Beach, acquired 500 used Social Bicycles models from a defunct Uber-operated bikeshare system and are in the process of refurbishing and integrating them into the existing Long Beach Bike Share network. This integration will expand the Long Beach Bike Share system to more than two times its original fleet size and most importantly provide better access to shared bicycles for the communities that need them most.
We are proud of this solution in part because it kept these 500 bicycles from ending up in a scrapyard. In every problem we encounter, Pedal Movement does its best to choose a sustainable solution.
