Uber’s Jump bikes get a second life in Mexico City

Uber wanted to get out of the bicycle business, so a Mexico City cyclist radical took 1,600 bikes off the company's hands. It's a near affair they did — elsewhere in the world, Uber just conveyed them to the fleck muckle.

When it isn't rescuing hundreds of bicycles from destruction, Bicitekas advocates for bikeable cities, which information technology has kaput the last 22 years. The group's hope in rescuing the bikes to give people who ordinarily get into't have entree to bike-sharing programs other way of transportation. To do that, Bicitekas stipendiary Uber a representative peso for each bike.

Away coincidence, a few weeks in the first place, Bicitekas was operative along a similar project called "Recicletas" where they received old bicycles or spare parts to revive and donate the almost-new bicycles to aesculapian staff and first responders, says Agustín Martínez, the aggroup's president. Insofar, they have repaired, built, and given 113 bicycles to health workers since Crataegus oxycantha. Reclaiming Uber's Jump bikes was an writ large style to expand their work.

Uber acquired Chute for $200 million in 2018 with the end of using the bike-share organisation to get ahead a one-stop shop for urban mobility. At the time of the accomplishment, Jump had 12,000 bikes in 40 cities and six countries.

Jump arrived in Capital of Mexic in August 2019 with a trifle more than 2,000 bicycles. Not flatbottomed a year had passed when it decided to leave the Mexican capital on with other major cities such as São Paulo in Brazil and Gran Santiago in Chilly. In May, after offloading Spring to Lime, Uber had to fire 14 pct of its employees worldwide out-of-pocket to the economic crisis from the pandemic. Slaked lime has since returned some of the bikes to a handful of cities in which it operates.

But a majority of the bikes were sent to scrapyards. Uber sparked an outcry among cyclists when social group media photos surfaced, screening the distinctive blood-red bikes in the trash. When Bicitekas saw videos of the scrapped bicycles, they reached bent Uber's bike sectionalization to pretend a negotiation. "We worked with repaired bicycles and in that respect were more than a G bikes just about to be destroyed … we just couldn't let that happen," said Martínez.

And it wasn't just bike advocates who were upset. Darío Mejía, former chief of mechanism at Jump in Mexican capital told The Verge, "I felt really sad because me and my team had worked so hard to make the Jump bikes the best ones in the world."

The hale Jump team worked hard to save the rest of the bikes after Uber trashed 600 units that were "almost like new," Mejía said. After looking for different slipway to rescue them, Rise was fit to sell the rest of its bikes to Bicitekas, once the batteries were abstracted. Bicitekas has to pay for adjusting them: patching the frame where the battery was, devising the new non-motored bikes lighter, and removing the Jump branding.

The bicycles were renamed "Bici Catarinas," or ladybug bikes, for their color. The cyclist group is still thinking about different ways to raise the almost $150,000 dollars they need to adapt the 1,600 Jump bikes.

Meanwhile, they set up a way to work with one of the 16 boroughs in Mexico Urban center and subsidize hundreds of bicycles. Bicitekas is lending 400 bicycles to Azcapotzalco, a periphery borough that is too far away from the government bike-joint system. The local government will repair and adjust the bicycles to use within its limitations. How the group will upgrade the money for the opposite 1,200 is still uncertain.

Mexico City wasn't the only when city that received some part of the Jump bicycles. The Cycle Dea Museum in South Everglade State received five and reported that another 5,000 might find new homes through with other organizations. The Divided Mobility Inc. in American buffalo received 3,000.

The pandemic brought major mobility changes in cities, benefiting cyclists. "I've been in that for 20 years and I've never seen so much an interest in bikes," said Areli Carreón, the Bike Mayor of Ciudad de Mexico and also a member of Bicitekas. "In the last months, all the local governments from the 32 Mexican States had plans operating theatre were already implementing bike infrastructure in their cities. We even worked with the federal government. To see that horizontal of political will is amazing."

Bicitekas has a goal of getting bikes to make up 3 percent of the trips taken in the Mexico Metropolis Metropolitan Area, according to Carreón. Good now, 2.2 percent of trips taken are made by bikes. "Thanks to the pandemic that goal that seemed very hard in January now seems more than achievable," Carreón says.

For like a sho, the project is taking its first steps — just Bicitekas knows that this effort is not only some rescuing bicycles. Their goal is to give a service to traditionally marginalized areas that can improve the quality of life of thousands of families, operating theater as they put it: "We want people to think in mobility not as a commodity but as a right."

Uber's Jump bikes get a second life in Mexico City

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/19/21523132/uber-jump-bike-mexico-city-reclaim-bicitekas