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We unlocked a million bicycles

And now you have to go catch one

August 29, 2017

We started Transit to provide our users with the ultimate urban transport experience. Beginning with public transit, we’ve since branched out to pretty much every mode: carsharing, ridesharing, and bikeshare.

Our team works hard to optimize every part of your journey. From locating a vehicle, to planning your trip, to knowing where to disembark, to giving you real-time data on your transit system (and bike/car/rideshare availability) so you know what to expect along your commute.

But there’s one part of the experience we hadn’t been able to improve: payments. Being able to avoid those clunky kiosks, those awful waits, every time you’re in a rush but don’t have a ticket or pass. So we launched an experiment: our first integrated payment system. No kiosks, no third-party websites. Enter in your payment info (inside the very same app you use to get around 👌) get a code, then get going. That simple.

We started with one small system: We-Cycle bikeshare in Aspen, with help from our friends at PBSC.

Today, we have some news.

Ten cities. Two seasons. One million bicycles.

Since launching in Aspen, we’ve partnered with bikesharing systems in eight North American cities: Chattanooga, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Louisville, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Montreal, Toronto. For good measure, we added Reyjkavik too. (A gift from one ice land, to another. 🇨🇦🍻🇮🇸)

When you open Transit in a supported city, you’ll see the availability of nearby bikeshare bikes.

Tap the bikeshare card, and you’ll be able to unlock a bike in five seconds or less (after you create an account or sign-in to an existing one, of course 😚). We’ll send you a code, you enter the code at the bike dock, the bike is yours. Boom-boom-boom. 💥

Sayonara, kiosks. 👋📮

Boom times a million: this month, our users took their 1,000,000th bikeshare trip.

That’s a million codes that we’ve given to users that have signed-in/signed-up (and a gotten a bike) through our app. More impressive? 90% of those trips took place in the last 12 months. Nearly 200,000 took place in July alone. 👏🌞

Unlock a bike—then blast past the street car. 🚲 💨💨💨 🚎

But we’re not just helping people unlock bikes. We’re helping them buy passes, too. Thousands of them.

Some folks download Transit because it’s the only app to buy bikeshare passes in their city. But they’re not the only ones taking advantage: we encourage long-time users (mostly public transit commuters) to incorporate bikeshare into their jaunts around town. Those users account for a full 30% of our pass sales.

What does this mean? People aren’t just discovering bikeshare through Transit. They’re actually taking it. We’ve removed the barriers from registration/payments so that even people who wouldn’t usually consider bikeshare are giddying up.

Mayors of Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto. Each city’s system is supported by Transit. (Goodbye “politician with cute baby” photos. Hello “politician with cute bikeshare” ones.)

We want to make it irresistibly easy to access transportation in your city. Whether it’s Uber or bikeshare or public transit—our team is eliminating every unnecessary tap, key, or kiosk that might stand in your way.

So we can’t wait to launch more cities. To serve more users. To make the payment experience even better.

But what’s after bikeshare?

That, my friend, is a very good question.

Special thanks to our technology partners: PBSC and Motivate/8D. (Next up…. you? Get in touch!)
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