Dublin City Council is teaming up with bicycle share company Bleeper to trial on-street cargo bicycle rental — on-street storage of the bikes has been installed, and the service is expected to go live in a week or so.
The project is being run by the Beta office, which trials different projects — from street art on utility boxes to bin solutions to rain planter boxes — and assesses the trialed measures before further rollout.
The council has installed a cargo bike locker in Portobello as part of the trail. It will hold two two-wheeled cargo bikes, which can be rented during the trial.
“Dublin City Council would like to explore a public, on-street, e-cargo bike-sharing service. This could be a good way for people to be able to use a cargo bike whenever they need one, without the cost or storage requirements of ownership. For many it would also help them to learn more about the benefits of e-cargobikes and various models to improve a later purchasing decision,” said DCC Beta.
It lists potential uses for an occasional e-carriage bike as including people going for a “big” weekly shop, transporting bulky sports equipment, travelling to the garden centre, allotment, or pet shop, moving small items of furniture, filling it with everything you’d need for a trip to a park or a picnic at the beach, and trips to the bottle bank or a recycling facility.
The trial location is in Portobello, Dublin 8. The Beta page for the trail outlines that the location was chosen because it’s a quiet roadway, which might be useful for those unfamiliar with cargo bikes at the start of their trip. It’s a residential area, close to several routes, including the Grand Canal Cycleway, well-lit, and beside a Dublin Bikes station.
The Beta page with more details can be accessed at dccbeta.ie/project/article/cargobike-sharing while the link in that to the Bleeper page will go live when the service is ready to be launched.
In the meantime, if you really need a cargo bike in Dublin, The Bike Hub, in partnership with Dublin City Council, offers a free borrow-an-e-cargo bike service at the Sundrive Pavillion in Eamonn Ceannt Park in Crumlin. Fingal County Council, with Bleeper, also offers cargo bike rental in Dublin 15 at the Mountview Community Centre, near the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre.
Close to the grand canal greenway, with kissing gates at regular intervals. It’s a no go area for cargo bikes. Sorry.
@Shaun — Have the gates beside the kissing gates not been opened more than they used to be?
In any case, the article refers to the Grand Canal Cycleway, which is not the greenway but the route between Portobello and the Docklands, where the route leads into a small network including along the quays (soon to go up as far as O’Connell Bridge) and onto the Royal Canal Greenway and that links to the C2CC route which goes onto other routes include the S2S Dublin Bay route.