Why Stash Bike exists

Stash Bike was created with the purpose of using technology to improve our cities by making them more walkable and cycle-friendly.

We believe that if we remove the fear of bike theft and make it easy for people to park their bikes anywhere confidently, we can get more people using human-scale transportation, which in turn makes our cities a better place to live.

That’s good for the environment, the cities, and their people (including drivers!).

 

Current State of Affairs

Most cities (especially in the US, Canada, and Latin America) are primarily built for cars.

Cars are an amazing tool in the transportation toolbox. But just as people don’t exclusively have a hammers in their toolbox, we don’t think cars should be the only tool available to move people from point to point.

They are expensive to operate (average ownership cost in US is $5,264 per year, and up to $9,304 in Michigan), which is a problem when the way cities are built means you have to get one. It’s a particularly big burden on low-income families, compounded by the fact that not having a car can also mean missing out on job opportunities. (source)

Personal vehicles like bikes, e-bikes, scooters, electric unicycles, onewheels, etc. (a.k.a. micromobility) are a great alternative for point-to-point trips, especially now that batteries have reached the point where making a multi-mile trip doesn’t have to involve sweat.

In places with good public transportation, it can be used in combination with micromobility. This allows a user to make long trips in public transit, and use the personal vehicle from the station to the final destination.

However, according to the Federal Highway Administration, almost 60% of trips made by car are 5 miles or less, about 40% are 3 miles or less and an astounding 20% of all car trips are 1 mile or less. (source)

Those are all perfect candidates to be replaced completely with micromobility. Short enough where the long range of a car is overkill, but too short to make public transportation practical.

 

Fun, accessible transportation

Micromobility vehicles are great fun and the cost of operation is very low.

You can get some outdoor time, exercise if you choose (with e-bikes you can tune exactly how much you want to exercise), they can be impervious to traffic, and easier to park, even when adopted at large scale.

All of this while needing no gas, no insurance, no registration and very low operation costs.

Energy costs of riding 5,000 miles:

  • Gas car (US median of 25mpg at $5/gal):  $1,000
  • Electric Car (~300Wh/mile at $0.15/KWh): $225
  • Personal Electric Vehicle without pedaling (~30Wh/mile at $0.15/KWh): $22
  • E-bike with pedal assist (~10Wh/mile at $0.15/KWh): $7
  • Non-electric Bike: $0

Micromobility is better for everyone, including drivers

Transportation is a major contributor of greenhouse-gas emissions. This will improve as more and more cars become electric and the electric grid becomes cleaner, which is great news.

However even if we had a 100% clean grid with 100% electric vehicles on the road, cars would still produce the same amount of traffic, parking issues, wear on the roads, etc.

By comparison micro mobility vehicles are typically electric or human-powered which means they have no emissions.

Additionally, they’re usually designed for one person, which has a lot of advantages: 

  • They occupy about ten times less space than a car
  • They consume 50 to 200 times less energy compared to a gas car
  • They consume 10 to 50 times less energy compared to an electric car
  • Need significantly fewer materials, including fewer batteries. A typical e-bike has less than 1% the amount of battery cells compared to a typical electric car.
  • Produce negligible wear on road surface. Road wear grows exponentially with weight. That means you need 16,000 people on bikes to produce the wear of one average car, or 59,000 bikes to produce the wear of one Chevy Tahoe. (source)
  • Are significantly quieter than cars, leading to neighborhoods with less noise pollution. Electric cars don’t have a loud engine, but since they’re heavy they still produce a lot of rolling noise when they reach a moderate speed. At highway speeds, they produce just about the same amount of noise as their fossil-fuel relatives.

Not everybody needs to switch

We understand that not everybody would like or is able to switch to micromobility for various reasons. And that’s OK. That’s not our goal. We want to make micromobility a viable alternative so people can have a real choice.

A few examples:

  • Someone could use an e-bike to go to work, but use a car to bring grandma to the doctor
  • Some families could downsize to one car for weekends trips (or no car and rent one for trips!). One, or both parents, and the children can bike or ride scooters to work/school.
  • Single-people that work from home or close to home could ditch the car altogether and rent a car occasionally when needed. This has the added advantage that they can rent a car that fits the need of the trip; A mini van for a family trip, a pickup truck to go to IKEA, or something fun to pick up a date.

With services like Getaround or Zipcar it’s even possible to rent a car by the hour for just a few bucks.

And for the people that still choose or need to drive everywhere: Fewer cars on the road means less traffic, less issues finding parking, cheaper fuel and electricity due to less demand, and fewer delays due to road maintenance.

We don’t need everybody to switch to make cities more enjoyable to live in and move around.

The challenges

The biggest challenge right now is that cities have been built with cars in mind for the better part of the last century. Therefore using a bike or other personal electric vehicle can be scary and unsafe in certain locations.

Changing that can be a chicken/egg problem. It’s not that cities don’t build more bike infrastructure because not enough people use it, but people don’t use it because there’s not enough infrastructure to reach their destination safely. In a lot of cases, the infrastructure that exists has major gaps like bike lanes that end abruptly in the middle of a busy street, bike paths that don’t connect to any meaningful destination, thin bike lanes in between cars driving 50 mph and parked cars whose doors could open at any second, etc.

Most cities that have taken the leap with properly planned infrastructure have benefited from it. Removing a car lane and converting it to bicycle lane counterintuitively tends to lead to less travel time for cars over time. This is because as more people start using the bike lane, fewer people are using cars, and one bike lane can hold five to ten more bikes than cars.

People choose how to get around based on the infrastructure available, Right now in most cities people are treated as second-class citizens if they can’t drive due to age, disability or cost.

The situation is improving though… slowly. Sales of e-bikes and other personal vehicles are growing. E-bikes are projected to grow from 3.9 million units sold in 2019 to 17 million sold in 2030. And even in 2021, more e-bikes were sold than electric cars. (source)

Thankfully a lot of cities are noticing and improving their infrastructure. Not fast enough in our opinion, but that’s where we’re trying to help.

Our role

There needs to be political will to improve the bike lane network in our cities, for sure. That needs many citizens to make their voices heard, and it can take years, or even decades.

Being a small startup we don’t think trying to tackle this problem directly is the fastest approach, at least not at the beginning.

It’s not up to us to build bike lanes, and while we could go to City Hall to make our voices heard (and we will when necessary), that’s not how we think we can make the biggest impact throughout the country.

When a person is deciding between a car and an alternate transportation, the route to get there safely is just one element of the trip. A big one, for sure, but there are other hurdles to solve before biking can be as, or more compelling than driving.

A big deterrent from using biking as transportation is theft. While bikes are not nearly as expensive as cars, they can have a significant cost, especially with e-bikes.

And that is a problem where we are confident we can make a significant improvement.

By making it easy for people to park their bikes anywhere with confidence, we can get more people biking, which over time can help cities gain the political will to improve the bike infrastructure, which will get even more people using alternative transportation and so on.

We believe that with this approach we can snowball to get thousands of people biking and voting for better infrastructure in multiple cities in the same amount of time it would have taken us to fight for one bike lane in one city as private citizens.

Your role

Whether you want to help us achieve this vision, or you simply want a safe place for your bike at your destination or business. Let us know by requesting Stash Bike at one of the buttons below. If you simply want to be notified about when we launch in new cities and similar announcements, enter your email and subscribe to our email list.

Request Stash Bike for your business or campus
Request Stash Bike for your neighborhood / city

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