About 75 biking enthusiasts attended a public forum Monday night to hear ideas on how Nice Ride Minnesota will transition to a new way of operating — dockless bike sharing.
Nice Ride now rents 1,850 of its signature green bikes from about 200 stations throughout the Twin Cities. Those who rent the bikes are expected to return them to any Nice Ride station.
But the bike-sharing industry is quickly changing to a new dockless model, where bikes can be rented wherever users find them (usually by smartphone app) and left and locked wherever their trip ends.
Nice Ride put out a request for proposals last summer to find potential operators of the new system and to gather new ideas on how bike sharing will evolve in the Twin Cities. A new system is expected to be approved in coming weeks.
Representatives from the two finalists, New York-based Motivate International Inc. and California-based LimeBike, each made presentations and answered questions from the audience at Macalester College in St. Paul on Monday.
Both companies have similar ideas about how dockless bikes could be introduced to the Twin Cities. LimeBike, a fast-growing venture-capital-funded firm that will be in 30 markets by year's end, has only dealt with the dockless bike-sharing model, while Motivate operates docked systems similar to Nice Ride on four continents and in such cities as New York and Chicago.
Each company said a limited number of bikes would be available here in winter, but the bikes themselves may be modified for cold-season biking. (Nice Ride bikes are seasonal.)
The Nice Ride bikes would remain available for a period of time as the new fleet is introduced. It's likely that hubs of dockless bikes would be located near existing Nice Ride stations.
