Lianne Fonseca says her life has been "transformed" by the electric bike
she started using during the pandemic.

Ms Fonseca rents hers for 149 Canadian dollars ($112; £91) a month through
an e-bike rental company called Zygg.

For her this generally means from March to October, pressing pause to avoid
the harsh Canadian winter season when temperatures in Toronto can fall to
below -30C.

[Haven’t we seen that cyclists do ride in snow?]

[What does Ms Fonseca do for the October to March period? Starve? Stay
isolated? Hibernate? The BBC is a bit shy on the matter, unsurprisingly]

Still, why rent? "It's really expensive to buy an e-bike," she responds.
"They can be worth a few thousand dollars, and I don't have the confidence
to select which one to buy. And I'm not confident I could fix it if it went
wrong."

Instead, if anything stops working on her rented e-bike then the hire firm
repairs it.

You use an app to locate where the nearest bikes and scooters have been
left at random spots on the nearby pavements by the previous users.

Such has been the global growth of these "dockless" systems that they have
long been criticised as a form of street litter.

Zygg chief executive Kevin McLaughlin launched the business in Toronto in
2020, followed by Vancouver last year. He now hopes to expand to other
Canadian cities and across the US.

In addition to serving members of the public, the firm also rents out the
e-bikes to couriers and food delivery companies.

"The idea is to take an expensive asset worth around C$4,000 and give that
to someone for about C$150 a month, and we'll take care of all the hassle,"
says Mr McLaughlin.

John Parkin, professor of transport engineering at the University of the
West of England, says the bike-docking hire schemes helped enable the
long-term subscription businesses to take off. This is because more people
got used both to cycling and to using a bike that they didn't own.

However, Prof Parkin, who is also deputy director of the university's
Centre for Transport and Society, says a major challenge for the companies
involved is the sheer capital expenditure of buying all the bikes in the
first place. "It's massive capital and it's burning capital," he says.

"I'm not sure where the profitability lies, as maintenance and moving them
across cities is a massive cost, so keeping a lid on costs is probably a
challenge for such companies."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64371657

--
Spike