The return of e-bikes in Derby is now just weeks away with a senior council manager insisting huge lessons have been learned from a disastrous project years ago. A new e-bikes scheme for Derby will kick into gear in late April with an official announcement due to be made in the coming weeks.

This new scheme will see a total of 550 e-bikes rolled out across the city with the first 150 vehicles being introduced at key locations.

The project was agreed by council leaders last year with funding for it provided by the Department for Transport – two years after the council were forced to pull the plug on its first e-bike scheme due to well-publicised vandalism issues. The council said in 2019 that more than 67 per cent of its e-bikes fleet became inactive, and the estimated costs of repairs were significant – making the project financially unsustainable.

But almost three years on the wheels are back in motion and hundreds of the vehicles will be returning to many parts of the city. Steering the project will be world-leading electric vehicle company Lime. The e-bikes will be available for hire via the Lime app and will cost £1 to unlock and then 17p per minute. Minute bundles will be available to purchase.

In addition to this, Lime will offer 50 per cent off the cost of e-bike rides for lower-income residents via its Lime Access programme. As part of increased security measures, users will be required to go through an enhanced multi-factor authentication process, uploading a copy of their ID to activate their Lime account and start riding.

The council says the return of e-bikes will help towards its ambition to make electric transport more accessible within Derby and achieve a target to become carbon neutral by 2035. However, the e-bikes’ upcoming return was questioned during a council meeting earlier this week (Tuesday, March 7).

Mackworth Conservative councillor Gaurav Pandey asked senior council officers at the regeneration scrutiny meeting if their return would lead to the same problems seen a few years ago. Councillor Pandey said: “We did a pilot of the e-bikes which wasn’t very successful. Why are we bringing them back again? Even Nottingham’s project has failed – isn’t this giving us the direction that this is going to be a huge problem?”

But Verna Bayliss, director of planning, transport and engineering at Derby City Council, said the new scheme will be completely different this time around. She said: “We have taken all the learning from that original Derby scheme into this scheme. Trust me, it will not be like the old scheme.

“The technology has moved on massively. The bikes can now be controlled by GPS. You can get it to stop and slow down. They can’t work out of certain areas of the city and we can manage the speed of those bikes..

“Honestly, we have really worked hard with our colleagues in Nottingham to get this over the line and to make sure the Derby scheme fits for Derby. E-bikes are very much here. There’s quite a lot of people out there using them. It’s a good way of getting people to use a bike so I still think it is a really good scheme.

“The operator’s approach is they will build the scheme slowly – so they won’t go ‘here are all your e-bikes in the city’ – they will work in communities and then slowly grow the scheme out. We absolutely wanted that for Derby. We do have a different approach for the city because of the things we’ve experienced.. I’m very hopeful this is going to be a great scheme and make a massive difference.”

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-news/e-bikes-return-derby-were-8228065