What Cities Need to Understand About Bikeshare Now

At the beginning of April, the ride-hailing giant Uber acquired the bikeshare company called Jump for $200 million. Jump vends and operates its neon-red electric bicycles in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and, soon, Sacramento; it’s the second skin of a firm called Social Bicycles, which had by 2017 seen its dockless smart-bike equipment deployed in over 40 cities.

The rebranding of Social Bicycles as Jump signified a few things. A company that had previously only sold bikeshare equipment was vertically integrating to both own and operate it, and it was committing to e-bikes as a differentiator in the increasingly crowded field of personal mobility devices. The purchase of Jump by Uber, which shakes out to about $13,000 per bike, revealed a few more things, like that short trips in cars are miserably unprofitable.