A quick tour and then go away. JUMP, present in Paris since April 2019, has just withdrawn its fleet of 5,000 electric bikes and 430 self-service scooters from the streets of the capital. Only a few dozen devices still appear on Monday in the Uber app, which had bought JUMP in 2018 to diversify its activities.
"The entire fleet disappeared on Sunday and I have a screenshot this Monday morning of a single bike available in the north of Paris ... No announcement has been made by the company for users to plan their journeys this Monday. I am currently late and angry, ”says Constance, a regular Parisian client of JUMP.
Despite higher prices than Vélib '(1 euro + 15 cents per minute), the red bikes designed in San Francisco (United States) had nevertheless found their audience in Paris, where each copy was rented 4 to 5 times a day on average, according to figures from the company Fluctuo, specializing in the observation of micromobility markets.
Jump is removing its bikes from Paris.
Yesterday (June 14th), there were less than 220 bikes available vs 3,000 on June 5th pic.twitter.com/QlMY7dWRkO
How to explain this hasty departure from Paris, presented until then as the main world market of JUMP? The company is one of the victims of the Covid-19 crisis in the very fragile micro-mobility sector.
Thousands of bikes put in the recycling center in the United States
In early May, its parent company Uber announced that it had invested $ 170 million to save Lime, the operator of electric scooters, also in great financial difficulty since the start of the health crisis. The agreement between the two groups, which share common shareholders (Alphabet, parent company of Google), provides that Lime acquires JUMP. Uber himself, riddled with debts, has laid off almost a quarter of his employees worldwide in the midst of a health crisis.
Operational decisions went very quickly. In May, JUMP suddenly disappeared from many cities in Europe and the United States, where tens of thousands of red bikes were destroyed. The images of these electric bikes in good condition, discarded instead of being recycled, shocked. JUMP explained this by arguing that these bikes, requiring maintenance and special tools, could not be donated to associations or resold.
More keep rolling in and getting trashed.🚲🗑️ Probably THIRTY semi loads🚚🚚🚚 or more so far ... #SenselessWaste #BikesForKids 👧👦 @UberJump pic.twitter.com/ee3NmCP7If
- Cris Moffitt (@CrisMoffitt) May 27, 2020Will Lime put part of the Parisian fleet of electric bikes back into service? Nothing is specified for the moment. "Even if the partnership (with Lime) is not yet closed in Europe, we have moved the majority of our scooters to our warehouses for the transfer of operations to Lime," said a spokesperson for Uber in France. JUMP has several maintenance centers, in the 12th and 16th districts of Paris, as well as in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Only Vélib 'remains on the market
To date, the capital no longer has any “free fleet” bicycle service, after the successive departures of Gobee Bike and oBike, Ofo, Oribiky, Donkey Republic and Mobike.
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Vélib ', a network funded by local authorities, is the only shared bicycle service available across Greater Paris.
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