Last night, approximately 200 vehicles from Uber’s electric-assist bicycle-sharing service Jump, appeared on the streets of Montreal. While dockless e-bikes and scooters have been in many U.S. cities for a few years now, this is Jump’s first foray into the Canadian market. To call Jump dockless, isn’t quite accurate though. Uber requires that Jump bikes be locked to existing bike racks, or explicit Jump docking stations. While this is not quite ‘park anywhere,’ there are plenty of bike racks situated throughout the city of Montreal.
With scooter-share companies chomping at the bit to enter the Canadian Market (Lime will supposedly descend on Montreal in the coming weeks), Jump has been a kind of ‘test’ shared-mobility service for Montreal. It has been interesting to observe reactions of citizens as they come across these brightly coloured bikes, download the Uber or Jump app, and take them for a test ride.
As a research lab, we are very interested in how these bikes will be used in Montreal and if they will differ from the exiting BIXI bike-share service, or differ from how they are used in other cities. So far the Uber/Jump team have been hesitant to openly share their data (as is the case with most micro-mobility companies). We are hoping that an official GBFS/MDS feed will be released soon. In the meantime, we have started to conduct some analysis with the data to which we do have access.