Bike scheme costing £15m backed despite failure of previous project

The announcement was made at the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) board meeting, the new scheme will see 150 e-bikes and 1,350 pedal bikes available for hire at various ‘stations’ across the region.

It is thought that the process for hiring one of the new bikes will be similar to that in London, which has had a successful e-bike scheme for a number of years now.

Approval of the scheme comes just over a year since the collapse of the previous scheme, which would have been provided through company Nextbike.

The WMCA says that the contract with Nextbike was cancelled "as a result of numerous contract breaches", with the company set to have supplied twice the number of cycles that are now being provided through the new scheme before the contract was cancelled.

The experience with Nextbike means that the future contract between the WMCA and the new provider will be a service contract, not a commercial contract, meaning the authority will take on greater liability for the success of the scheme and will be required to front some of the costs for its set up.

"Following a full review it’s been determined that the client is going to have to inject some funding to make a scheme commercially viable, so we are required to put some public money in here,” said Councillor Ian Ward, portfolio leader for transport.

"And the method that we’re now adopting is to re-procure via a service contract. There is a need to include a proportion of e-bikes within any scheme – none of us are getting any younger and it gets progressively difficult, especially with the hills – so e-bikes I’m sure will be widely welcomed.

"The scheme will initially operate over the seven constituent local authorities, but I want to reassure everyone that there is an opportunity for expansion to the non-constituent local authorities in the future.

"The supplier will supply all of the infrastructure and high quality maintenance regime, and will also supply the docking stations over the contract period.

"Those docking stations won’t require electricity input because the e-bikes are powered by interchangeable batteries and they are the latest generation of hire cycles that are available on the market, and they will for all bikes include three gears, which hopefully for the non e-bike users, those will be sufficient to deal with the hills across the WM footprint.”