Baltimore Electric Bike Share Program

They struck up a conversation with Alex Kukich, 30, of Locust Point, as he passed by at McHenry Row. A minute later, Kukich was on one of the Pedelec bikes, riding it around the block and up through a parking garage to try it out.

"It's awesome," said Kukich, who works at the video advertising firm Videology. "It's fun, it's clean, it's different."

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UMB is The Founding Campus of the University System of Maryland.

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Representatives of the city’s program, Baltimore Bike Share, and its operator held a “lunch-and learn” session on Nov. 21 at the University of Maryland BioPark, which is the site of one of several stations accessible to students, faculty and staff of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB).

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Electric bikes are a hallmark of the system
Beyond being new, Bmorebikeshare stands out because it has North America's largest fleet of bikes with an electric motor

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I tested the electric bikes on an uphill climb on the newly created Maryland Avenue protected bikeway, and it was amazing how helpful pedelec was. The extra giddy up made for a ton of fun whether on a hill or flat land.

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This spring, the system is set to grow to 50 stations with 500 bikes. And since many of the new stations will be uphill from where stations are concentrated now, the pedelecs will be in even more demand.

Is expanding the pedelec fleet actually doable?

Liz Cornish, Executive Director of Bikemore, Baltimore's bicycling infrastructure and policy advocacy organization, said the pedal-assist bikes cost $1300 compared to $1000 for the regular bikes.

If the bikeshare expanded by another 500 bikes and they were 100% electric-assist, it would only be $150,000 more than an all regular bike purchase. This is not much money if the world of transportation expenditures.

Of course, bikes with pedelec may cost more to fix and maintain. But in a hilly city like Baltimore, splurging on the electric bikes to tilt the percentages of the fleet toward the pedelec bikes will likely make sense.

The best step forward would be for Bewegen to track which bikes are being used in order to get data on user-preference. If my hunch is true—that more people in Baltimore will travel to more places by bikeshare thanks to the new pedelec bikes—it'd be great to find a way to make sure that's what's added to the system.

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Because of the bikes’ GPS tracker, Baltimore authorities have been able to track down and return many of the stolen bikes, but damage sustained when they’ve been forcibly removed from docking stations has resulted in a repair backlog, The Sun reported.

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