On Thursday morning, Metro Mobility, a micromobility startup based in Cambridge, cut the ribbon on a new solar-powered docking station for e-bike rentals next to the Davis Square Red Line station.
The station features a bike rack that can park up to five Metro Mobility e-bikes underneath a canopy of solar panels. On the side, a cabinet with a 3.6 kilowatt-hour battery can store excess solar power to charge bikes overnight or on cloudy days.
Metro Mobility CEO David Montague explained that solar-powered e-bike charging stations could considerably reduce the logistical hassles and costs of re-charging e-bikes in a bikesharing system.
The stations for the region's dominant bikesharing service, Bluebikes, are currently not capable of re-charging the new e-bikes that debuted at the end of 2023.
"Instead, the station operator has to drive big, gas-guzzling trucks around to replace the depleted e-bike batteries every night. But with this station, you don't have to do that," said Montague. "It gets electricity from the sun, it's completely off-grid, effectively bringing the operational cost of charging these e-bikes to zero."
Another key difference between Bluebikes and the Metro Mobility system is that Metro Mobility requires its users to return their bikes to the same place where they checked them out. While Bluebikes are ideal for single trips between neighborhoods, with hundreds of docking stations spread throughout the region, Metro Mobility is more geared towards longer-term bike rentals.
Rentals are just $1 for the day for income-qualified individuals (with the same income guidelines as the T's new low-income CharlieCard), or $12 a day for everyone else.
Earlier this year, Metro Mobility won a $1.5 million grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to install more of its shared e-bike stations at public transit stations.
In the past year, the company has also added stations at McGovern Transit Center in Lawrence, the Newburyport MBTA station, and the WRTA transit center at Worcester Union Station. Those other docks all draw power from the grid by plugging into nearby electrical power sources.
As we've reported previously, the consortium of municipalities that own the Bluebikes system are seeking bidders for a new operating contract. Among other maintenance and customer service tasks, the winning bidder will also be responsible for re-charging the system's growing fleet of e-bikes on a daily basis.
StreetsblogMASS asked Metro Mobility if they were considering bidding for the contract, or partnering with another bidder to license their technology for the Bluebikes system.
In an emailed response, the company's operations manager, Jonathan Vandenberg, said that "operating someone else's dated technology is not something we are interested in. We are interested in growing programs with new technology that provides more affordable mobility to our users."
