Bleeper and Moby to offer new service for Dublin City Marathon, DublinBikes stuck in shutdown mentality

­Bleeper and Moby,, bike share systems, are to offer a new service for the Dublin Marathon tomorrow.

Meanwhile, DublinBikes is stuck in shutdown mentality — unlikely similar systems around the world which provide temporary stations for large events, DublinBikes is just shutting down stations.

­Bleeper and Moby are combining to make the first such event hubs for bicycle share at a large event in Ireland.
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Bleeper said: “On Sunday 30th October, to facilitate access to the Dublin City Marathon, there will be a pop-up parking facility for Bleeper (& Moby) bikes on the East side of St. Stephen’s Green.”

“People can drop off and pick up Bleeper bikes at this location from 7am until 6pm, and it is a short walk from the Start/Finish point of the marathon on Merrion Square.”
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However, Bleeper said there is also a service Interruption notice for the ESB eBikes stations at Finglas and Santry, which will be out of service this weekend for routine maintenance, and the stations at Lucan and Parkwest are being upgraded and will remain offline until the upgrades have been completed.

The ESB eBikes are run by Bleeper and Moby, although these are a small part of their overall fleets.

Bleeper said: “Please double-check bike availability in the Bleeper app before arriving at an ESB eBikes docking station. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this service interruption.”

Moby is also offering free trips for runners and their supporters from Friday until Monday, use code in their app; MOBY4MARATHON.

Regarding DublinBikes, DublinBikes said: “The following stations will be closed from the afternoon of Friday 28th Oct until the morning of Tuesday 1st November to accommodate the Irish Life Dublin Marathon which is taking place on Sunday 30th October: Merrion Square East (25), Merrion Square West (26), Merrion Square South (113), Fitzwilliam Square East (89), Mount Street Lower (56).”


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5 comments

  1. That’s all great but the ever increasing amount of commercial bike renting companies need to leave our cycle-racks free for us cyclists. Its getting ridiculous at this stage, with sometimes up to eight racks provided but no space at all for us – full up with commercial bikes of various hues.

    Reply
    • I’ve mentioned this to Fingal’s Active Travel Unit and they’ve said that they’ll ask bike share operators to leave space for private bicycles. Even outside Fingal’s Blanchardstown office the racks are swamped with Tier and Bleeper bikes.
      It’s not really the fault of users – they are using racks as required by the operators.
      I think that operators may have too many bikes that are not actively used. As Michael asks, usage data would be interesting.

      On Saturday Tier bikes took up half the racks at Lidl Clonsilla. Other half by private users. Another cyclist and I had to lock our bikes to fencing on the opposite side of the car park.
      https://twitter.com/DaymoBrew/status/1589721825566928897

      Reply
      • Surely the solution is more bike parking? Looking at Lidl Clonsilla, there are 41 car parking spaces and only 6 bike parking spots.

        The move by the councils to add bike parking in advance of the bike share companies coming in was welcome. They need to double down and add more spots, especially at these pinch points.

        Reply
  2. Both Tier and Bleeper are present in Skerries and both types of bike dominate the bike racks around the town. A lot of suggestions/submissions made on foot of the public consultation on Active Travel draw attention to this. While the availability of rental bikes may be a good thing in a small town of 10,000 like Skerries it would be helpful to evaluating this if we had some info on usage levels. Is there any published info on usage levels available?

    Reply
  3. I have consulted several premises, such as supermarkets and libraries who have all said that the commercial bike rental companies pull-up in lorries and deposit the bikes on these racks Its not that groups of actual user/renters are doing it-its the companies themselves (i.e. the premises are not even getting any business from it).So we have to state it clearly to those companies, who all think they are in an environmentally friendly/cool industry that this aint cool, infat it is clogging-up public access and putting all but the most determined cyclists off. It is unacceptable. Another thing is that the worst offenders are e-motorised bikes anyway-not really cycles-so should be kept away away from “cycle” racks. Just like commercial Bus companies do, these companies have to get their own positions or they have no right being in the market.

    Reply

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