Gavin Breeze, director of EVie, added that ‘things had been mad’ with the bikes being rented on average between 100 and 200 times a day – peaking on Easter Saturday with 350 individual hires.
‘It has definitely been better than I thought it would have been, especially when you layer in the planning that we did for this before Christmas, hoping to get a certain level of take-up,’ he said.
‘Covid-19 happened and we had no idea what would happen but we are now in a position where, if we can get everything in place, then we would be looking to expand next year and double the fleet.’
He added: ‘Victoria Avenue has been popular but typically we see a lot of people using the Railway Walk – up to Corbière and back again. I think a lot of cities that have a similar scheme in place probably do not have a track like that for people to go up. It has been quite a busy route for us.
‘We will eventually be putting together a heat-map of the most popular areas and making that data available to the government so it can inform their cycle-path planning.’
Over the years, a number of cities across the world have withdrawn support for public self-hire bikes after many were left abandoned on busy pavements, thrown into canals and dumped in rivers.
However, Mr Breeze said he had received very few complaints about EVie bikes being left in inappropriate places.
‘We have around 80 bike racks which the bikes are parked at and if customers end the rental outside of the rack they are charged £2, which is not a huge sum of money but it is annoying,’ he said.
‘Because of the geo-location technology the bikes have, we can see exactly where they are and can go and collect them. But there are going to be people who leave them in silly places.’
London’s Santander Cycles – often referred to as Boris Bikes – have now been in place for ten years and have been a roaring success.
Despite this, no plans to introduce a self-hire bike scheme in Jersey ever came to fruition.
Asked if he was surprised that a similar scheme had not been launched previously, Mr Breeze said: ‘You need to be quite
commercially brave. It takes a chunk of cash and you need to be in position to
risk that and potentially have no return.
‘The whole debate around sustainable transport is now happening for real. Part of what motivated me was that I thought Jersey should be an all-electric Island and I thought unless the private sector took a risk then no one will do it.
‘There is policy for this sort of thing but no action and there needed to be a mass Islandwide action to start helping to combat the climate change issue.’
