Riding the work bike - Bendigo Victoria

MONDAY JUL 27 / 2015 / by Andrew Talati
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Ridng the work bike from the City of Greater Bendigo

Bike Fleet offers four different bikes in four different yet convenient CBD locations across the organisation. And from all accounts, it’s a winner. You simply book out a bike like you would normally do for a car, grab the bike and go for a ride.

While there has been a couple of time when people have missed out on a bike, due to the relatively closeness of locations, they have been able to get one of the other bikes.

So far the programme has clocked over 100 trips and that’s all just in the first five months of operation. It has saved the City of Bendigo about 500kms of car travel in that time so it’s also freeing up resources; if the trip involves going out of town the cars are utilised but for small trips the bikes are used. And that’s exactly was the programmed was designed to target.

City of Greater Bendigo Bicycle fleet
Parking work bike

The bikes used were a deliberate choice. From early surveying the members of the organisation identified three key criteria; comfort, convenience and time. The bikes were selected based on these findings and it seems to have worked out. Comments are often received about the bikes themselves and being a step-through, just about anyone can hop on and ride. While the bikes may not be the exact style everyone prefers, the programme co-ordinators are gathering feedback for the next bike purchases. ‘We had to prove it would work first,’ says Rob.

Bendigo Bicycle fleet
City of Bendigo promotions

The City of Bendigo initially engaged Uni students to map out an ideal catchment for Bike Fleet; the catchment was based on the distance that could be covered by riding for a predetermined amount of time. The result was a catchment a couple of kms in radius, which cover a large area of Bendigo itself. The mapping identified about 40 organisations that could be ridden to. In fact, most of Bendigo is within about a 20min ride making this type of programme perfect.

The benefits of the scheme so far are the obvious ones of environmental responsibility and sustainability as well as a more healthy and engaged workforce. ‘When people talk about being active, it spread throughout the organisation and more people then want to get out and mobile. It’s all good for your business and your personnel’.

‘We know it’s not for everyone but starting with early adopters it’s growing. If you can get that first 10-15% engaged it will cause a flow-on effect and it will eventually become normal. There will always be a few that won’t do it and that’s up to them but it should get to a point where we won’t have to buy an extra car and soon. It just makes sense. People enjoy it and that’s the other great benefit – happy staff. We reached our goal pretty quickly. We used an Instagram style internal communications and marketing plan. People had their photo taken with a board saying Bike Fleets and people really enjoyed that. We even had a video made of the CEO enjoying a ride.’

Making the programme easy to use and breaking down any perceived barriers made Bike Fleet all the more successful. To book out a car staff need to complete the booking form, walk over to another building, pick up the keys etc etc. – all that takes around 5mins that they could already have been riding. With Bike Fleet they can book and be out on the bike in under two minutes so it’s mighty convenient.

Personally Rob cycles to work and enjoys the 6-7min ride, a ride he says isn’t worth taking the car for. And that’s the great thing about Bendigo and why Bike Fleet is gaining traction, everything is relatively close – a 15-20min ride at the most. 

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