Uber's first Italian foray into pedal assisted electric bike sharing is in Rome and it's called Jump. Seven hundred new bikes have invaded the streets of the capital.
"The arrival in the Eternal City is an important piece of the puzzle that wants to tell what Uber is today, or rather a single app that offers multimodal transport services", commented the general manager of Uber Italy Lorenzo Pireddu.
Jump was purchased by Uber in 2018 for approximately $200 million. Pedal assisted bicycles are already found in 8 European capitals, from Madrid, to Paris, to Berlin, and in 13 cities in the United States. But also in New Zealand, Canada and Mexico.
You can start your ride in three steps: by opening the Uber app and selecting the Bike category from the main menu, you can book the nearest vehicle. By scanning the QR code, the bicycle is unlocked, after the first pedal stroke the electric motor starts. Once you reach your destination, you need to tie the bike to a rack in the areas indicated or on the sidewalk, avoiding getting in the way of pedestrians or other vehicles. Renting Uber's new bike is 20 cents a minute.
In other countries, where the service is more advanced, Uber, in addition to traditional services, also offers other solutions for citizens' mobility: for example electric scooters and public transport, as happens in California.
According to data from the Milan Polytechnic, the results relating to the use of electric bicycles in Italy are positive: sales of traditional ones in 2018 amounted to around 1,4 million, down by 7,7 percent compared to the previous year. previous year, while electric ones amounted to around 173 thousand units with a growth rate of 16,8 percent.
“I'm curious to see how it goes, it's an interesting experiment. In Paris Jump is all the rage. It remains to be seen how the Romans will respond,” he commented Massimo Ciuffini, coordinator of the National Sharing Mobility Observatory.
Although in 2013 Uber's rental cars were greeted by demonstrations by taxi drivers, controversies and protests, Lorenzo Pireddu in an interview with Sole 24 ore recalled some strategic lightness made by his company when entering the market of Italian rental cars and said: “We have learned that to launch a service you need to collaborate with the cities, not start dealing with the laws only afterwards. Our goal is not to rush, but to build solutions based on the needs of customers and partners and on compliance with the law".
