Bike share schemes have mushroomed in cities over the past 20 years or so, bringing low cost, eco-friendly transport to millions. But who maintains all those bikes? The quiet heroes of the cycling boom tend to remain invisible, and yet those shared bikes would quickly disappear from our streets without the maintenance teams who keep them in good nick. The firm behind many of those teams is Vélogik, a French company also operating in the UK, as Olivier Carton, its CEO, explains.
‘Vélogik was started back in 2008. The idea was to help bike shared services to grow and be maintained in the proper way,’ says Carton. ‘So the first services were in Lyon, then Grenoble, then Clermont Ferrand, and then we gained more services, specifically with La Poste, pretty much everywhere in France.’
Vélogik’s big moment came in 2019 when it won a contract to work with Vélib, which runs a vast fleet of public bikes in Paris. ‘We now maintain about 40% of their fleet on a daily basis. So we have a big workshop in Paris,’ Carton says. And in 2020, Vélogik created a subsidiary in the UK. ‘So we now operate bike services in Glasgow, Leeds and Swansea, and we’re beginning a service in Bristol.’
As well as maintenance, Vélogik also manages the fleets of city bikes, making sure they are accessible to users. ‘When you have 1,000 stations in a city, users usually get a bike from up the hill and ride it down the hill,’ explains Carton. ‘Reallocation of bikes between stations is key. We need to make sure that every bike station at any given time is not totally full so that nobody can put a bike back in, but half full, so there’s always a bike available and a parking slot for when you finish your ride.’
Having started out as a group of cycle-loving friends, Vélogik now employs 160 people. ‘We manage 55,000 bikes altogether and have some 50 mobile or fixed workshops.’ Carton says the firm is now pursuing maintenance contracts with subscription services, where e-bikes can be rented for months at a time. ‘Users don’t share the bike, they are responsible for it and they get a maintenance service thrown in,’ explains Carton. And it all comes for as little as €30 a month. Run by Véligo, it operates 20,000 long-term subscription bikes in Paris.
Now, Vélogik is participating in a European survey which Carton hopes will convince governments of the benefits of funding bike share services. ‘We want to demonstrate that there is a return on investment when you invest in a bike share service – less health spending, less congestion. And there are also financial benefits from investing in these services.’
