Velo City 2022 - Lyft Urban Solutions is participating in a panel, discover all you need to know

Lyft Urban Solutions believes in the development of cycling culture! Velo City brings together mobility players involved in politics, active mobility, sustainable urban development, and cycling promotion. The annual global cycling summit is organized by the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF), since 1980.  This year, four members of our Lyft Urban Solutions sales team and Gian Carlo Crivello, Lyft Urban Solutions’s Chief Relationship Officer (CRO), went to Ljubljana, Slovenia to participate. As bike share industry leaders, the event and its various conferences offer opportunities to share our expertise and to keep learning and innovating.  

 
Located in the heart of Europe, Slovenia’s Ljubljana is a strategic intersection of European mobility. With a downtown core that’s closed to cars, this city has become a good example of a city that encourages and promotes active and sustainable mobility. It’s therefore only natural that the annual Velo City 2022 conference takes place in this historic and avant-garde city.  

Panel with Gian Carlo and shared micromobility experts  

Gian Carlo Crivello participated in a panel that reunited experts and leaders of bike share enterprises. The panel, entitled “Changing the way micromobility companies work with cities", has a goal of debating trends to come, new innovations, and new ways of working with cities and lessons learned. Presented by Phillipe Crist, the session’s objective is to put bike sharing at the heart of the mobility transition. 

Various subjects were put forth to reflect on the challenges experienced by cities and explore solutions and innovations, in order to best integrate bike share as an urban mobility option. 

A rolling bike sharing system!

Our Chief Relationship Officer was able to offer advice on how to efficiently manage a bike share system in a city, especially by offering a custom solution made of strategically-placed stations and docking points; that is accessible, affordable to all, and easy to use. “First and foremost, it’s about concentrating on the user experience and the safety aspect,” said Gian Carlo Crivello, Chief Relationship Officer of Lyft Urban Solutions. 

This brings up another important issue: How to make bike sharing services affordable and accessible to all? Operators can access many different solutions to overcome these challenges. Here are a few examples, taken from the panel discussion: To ensure everyone can benefit from a city’s bike share program, it’s essential to offer bikes and technologies adapted to all types of people (different ages and sizes, for example). It is also important to serve all areas of a city, even more distant neighbourhoods. As well, operators can collaborate with sponsors and partners who offer grants that help keep user membership fees as affordable as possible. 

Rethinking multimodality 

Multimodality, a trend that’s taken off over the past few years, also comes with some challenges. To be efficient, multimodality must be smart and integrated. But how? Exploring this question, our panelists discussed how the integration of MaaS and the creation of smart mobility hubs are essential elements of multimodality. Not only can they bring all a city’s transport modes together within one MaaS application, but also, to create strategic points within cities that position bike sharing stations beside metro, train, or bus stations – which facilitates multimodal trips for users. 

Reflecting on the future of bike share 

The future of bike share was also discussed by Gian Carlo and panelists. What will bike sharing look like in a few years? What are the major political challenges and how do they influence our choices? It becomes essential to think differently about bike sharing, and start seeing bike share systems as an integral part of a city’s public transit network, with a system planned in collaboration with cities, operators, and suppliers. According to our panelists, making cities more organized also means rethinking mobility in its entirety and implementing urban mobility adapted to the challenges and needs of cities.

Bike share has a promising future. As today’s trends evolve, might they be replaced by new trends in the future? We might not know yet, but what we do know is that e-bikes are taking a predominant place in the shared micromobility industry, and we won’t stop seeing more and more electric bikes on our city streets.  
 
Our experts seem enthusiastic about bike share’s future, a tool for more sustainable and cleaner cities with better quality of life, for happy, healthy city-dwellers! 

Velo City 2022 isn’t yet over, you can find the Lyft Urban Solutions team at our booth until June 17!