Locate a bike and cruise with pedal-assist
By: Joe Gomez
JUMP Mobility, owned by Social Bicycles (SoBi), just launched the first electric-assist, dockless bike share system in the country. Our Maps SDK for iOS and Android is powering the app riders use to locate bikes. Our maps are also a key feature of JUMP’s behind-the-scenes tools for tracking and maintaining the bike-share system. If you live in the Washington DC area, you may have already seen the bright red electric bikes.
For less than the price of a bus ride, residents can unlock a JUMP bike and use pedal assist (a gentle boost) for longer commutes, challenging topography, or an easy ride. One of the aims of e-bike sharing is to solve the “first and last mile” problem of public transit, making the bus and rail systems more accessible to residents with a longer walk.
The dockless bike-share model, where riders can pick-up and leave bikes anywhere in the service area, is still relatively new. Nelle Pierson, Director of External Affairs at JUMP, explained the advantages for cities:
Traditional station-based systems are expensive and often constrained by the capital costs of the stations, which leads to reduced service areas. Under the dockless bike share permit in DC, we operate a fleet of our own e-bikes, which means we pay for everything but still have to play by the rules of DC’s permit. Our JUMP e-bikes lock to normal bike racks, which means that capital cost for stations is not a problem. Plus, we can provide residents with as many bikes as a city is willing to allow, which for DC is 400 right now.
The dockless system relies on live-tracking of GPS enabled bikes — people need to know where to find bikes, and JUMP needs to know where its bikes are. JUMP used our Maps SDK for iOS and Android to launch a rider-facing mobile app so it’s easy to locate a bike and any bike hubs across the city. Hubs, shown by polygons on the map, are geofenced areas where JUMP bikes are consistently available.
Like traditional bike share stations, these virtual hubs offer predictability for people looking for bikes as well as operational benefits for bike techs. To incentivize parking in hubs, riders actually get $1 off their trips.
JUMP is also leveraging our maps for its internal tools so bike technicians have a real-time, birds-eye-view. They track bike locations and repair status, ensuring there’s a sufficient number of working bikes available. That also means making sure bikes stay in the right areas. If a bike pops up on the map where it doesn’t belong, they dispatch a team to relocate it as quickly as possible.
Nelle told us why JUMP chose to build with our mobile SDKs:
For us, the SDK had many advantages over other native tools. Full control over the map layers is very important to us because our map is the first thing our riders interact with. It’s a crucial element of our product. We also needed to extensively customize our basemap, and we love the ability to add unique elements whenever we need to.
There’s also a growing network of developers using Mapbox, so solving problems or learning new things was easy for us. On top of that, the Support Team has always been very helpful and responsive. We have an engineer-centric culture at JUMP/Social Bicycles, and our engineers love working with Mapbox.
The JUMP engineering team is working on new map features like integrating our Directions API. The goal is to use our Navigation SDK to build an efficient turn-by-turn solution for mobile so riders don’t have to kick-out to other apps for directions.
Building applications to help people move through cities? Check out our solutions for asset-tracking, on-demand logistics, and transportation. Reach out to our sales team with any questions.
JUMP Mobility dockless bike-sharing was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.