Bikeep is happy to announce that it has launched its pilot project for Dublin City Council today in cooperation with The Civic Group. The first pilot station is installed in Dublin’s smart city testbed – The Smart Docklands District and will start serving the general public from 19’th of February. The first pilot is only a single 5 rack station but the city wishes to tip it’s toe in the water, get initial user feedback and start expanding the program onwards from there. Dublin City Council hopes to use Bikeep to fight against soaring bike theft in the city, every day about 20 bicycles are reported to be stolen and the reported cases are usually only the tip of the iceberg.
The average cost of a bike stolen in Ireland is €510. From that we are able to estimate that the problem is costing annually over 12m € directly to the citizens, not counting for the lost benefits achieved through cycling which are usually at bare minimum tenfold bigger. Just over half of all bikes were stolen on public streets, with almost a third stolen from homes.
Bike theft in Ireland is predominantly a Dublin problem with about 75% of nationally recorded thefts occurring in Dublin (reports form 2003-2013)Bikeep is smart city mobility enabler providing current services to personal bike users. The company has installed its bike parking stations to 11 different countries, totaling about 1250 bike racks. The company is expanding on its pilots’ stations for San Francisco Metro system – BART, expanding it’s partners and resellers network and currently going through a funding round to set up firm sales presence in the US.
