Trial results: Newcastle West End hub

Over the Australian summer Bykko held a trial in the West end of Newcastle in NSW with 3 electric bikes set at a Hub outside of the Rethink Financial Group building. Supported by the Newcastle City Council ‘Make Your Place’ Grant initiative, this hub was fixed for 3 months and trialed by more than 60 local residents and workers in the area.

Founder and CEO Monica adds  the comment “The most amazing thing about the Bykko Recharge trial in Newcastle is that it created a small community of Bykko riders. Most of them shared their life stories with us.  It was fantastic, deeply touching and rewarding to listen to their stories. We had users from pregnant women and yet to be born ‘baby Yeti’ to people with serious health issues, local rock stars, young couples doing their groceries shopping or going to yoga classes, employees taking a short break to re-energise or dropping off some paperwork in city, riding the Bykko bikes”.

There are a few interesting outcomes we noticed during post trial survey.

• The majority of respondents were 36-55 years old
• 41% of active members were women
• 87% of the survey respondents found easy and extremely easy to use electric bikes
• The majority of respondents used the bikes at least once a week during the trial
• Respondents generally worked on lived near the Newcastle West area

Areas that surveyed respondents considered room for improvement:

“If there was a BYKKO station at other areas in Newcastle (e.g. near the ferry) I would be able to use it more for getting to work.”
“Excellent trial love the bikes & would like to see several more bike stations around the city, honeysuckle & beaches.”
“I want to see it adopted for health and well-being of corporates and the community…big step to give Newcastle the opportunity to experience such an awesome facility.”
“Brilliant trial that needs the assistance of local council to expand across the city.”

It is exciting to see the support for the project in a region and Bykko looks forward to expanding services.

This trial has proven our point that even small scale bike share schemes can have great results for the local community.

“We hope the trial’s success will spark the interest of Corporates and property developers that consider themselves as early adopters of innovative ways of providing a transport alternative with real benefits on health and wellbeing. Newcastle is so beautiful if you go on a discovery journey. But if you go on your car, you’ll miss all these little pockets of creativity, local artists, small businesses and amazing story-telling places hidden in our amazing car-unfriendly lanes” says Monica.