Bikes Make Life Better
THE INNOVATION:
Helping companies design pools of bicycling assets for sharing across a corporate community, generating both functional and cultural benefits.
Kurt Wallace Martin, Co-Founder
Bikes Make Life Better - "Bicycle consultants to the world's best companies"
Introduction...
We believe that the road to saving ourselves from climate change will be traveled on bicycles.
The bicycle represents in the corporate world a victory on so many levels, so we can go with whatever works for that company… "We have a transportation problem on our big campus." Or, "we need employees to get around this small area quickly." And employees say, “This is fabulous”, “This is the best part of my day”, “This helps me clear my head”.
The biggest impacts we’re seeing are with the simplest bikes. Instead of $3000 bikes, we are using $300 bikes, and they are having a huge impact…The attachment is not to the bike itself, but the experience of the biking… and the business function that that achieves.
Bikes, Technology and Experimentation
At Facebook, the joy of it is that there are a lot of bikes, and they are different colors… but it is the fact that they are ubiquitous and everywhere that really gets people on-board…
Here's what we've learned: If you make bikes available, people will use them. And when they use them, they will be happier, they’ll get there faster, they’ll feel better, it’s a great break in the day, and they’ll keep using them… It changes people. You can see it. They’re animated, they’re smiling, they’re talking. As a company there is no other way that we could have provided this mobility, that would’ve done all these things at the same time.
If you put programmers on bikes, they will start talking coding, and have highly efficient discussions while moving their bodies and getting their brains engaged… “It’s not just biking to the meeting, it’s biking in the meeting.” That’s right.
Corporations own their territory more than a city does. A company can say, hey, we’re going to set up a biking ecosystem and change the rules... Tech companies have a habit of doing things quickly based on data that they’re collecting in real-time. It’s like software. “You can do lots of experiments relatively quickly at not great expense, get data, modify the system”. Yes. And at the corporate level, nothing about bicycles is expensive.
Words of Wisdom...
The client always informs how the bike is going to help them… We really listen to their story and craft a solution for them… For me, this is what’s fun.
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