Here at Spokesafe, we’ve long believed that increasing the number of journeys by bike doesn’t have to be complicated. Yes, as a priority our sector needs more genuinely safe cycle lanes which take us where we need to go. Investment into youngens learning how to ride. And yes, we need better marketing so that the general public can see we’re not all MAMILs all the time.
But there is one simple trick that instantly improves one form of cycling infrastructure, with no physical change necessary. It just involves offering cyclists booking options at cycle parking facilities which reflect their travel patterns, not the needs of an operator.
We’ve started receiving a few questions on this, so yes, for any cycle parking nerds out there, this one is for you. Here’s why we offer Daily bookings across the network.
Colchester Secure Bike Park, situated by Colchester Bike Kitchen and the eCargo Bike Library.
10,000 emails to learn one-off Daily booking options are a must
We launched Spokesafe as a very simple proposition. We knew there were lots of offices in the centre of London, with companies that had waiting lists full of staff who wanted to use cycle parking, but couldn't due to a lack of perceived space. We also knew that, surprisingly, there were certain areas in the capital which actually had underutilised space going on the cheap - car parks.
So it was a simple one. Just build some cycle parking spaces in car parks, and open the membership out to corporate clients. Long-term membership subscription options, easy to manage, and off to the beach we go!
If only things were that simple. We launched at the end of 2019, and within a few months the pandemic struck and lockdown arrived. The outcome for us? More people on bikes, but not necessarily in the centre of London. And no one cycling to their office 5 days a week.
So we had to pivot, as they say. To survive as a business, we had to offer short-term options which actually reflected how most cyclists were moving during the pandemic. Specifically, we needed to offer a one-off Daily booking option.
This was very hard. We didn’t have the technology built for this. So we spent our pandemic manually responding to every single booking request via email, by hand. At all hours of the day.
It was, as you can imagine, a nightmare. In fact, we know we processed over 2,500 Daily bookings, with an average email chain of at least 4 responses. So, at least 10,000 emails in total.
But it also taught us a valuable lesson.
If you give cyclists the option to book secure spaces on a short-term basis, they will use it.
That first location that we ran this from, Soho, has had over 1,267 cyclists book a one-off daily space. The unit fits into the size of just 2 car parking spaces.
And how has this impacted our wider network? Well, this month we will hit 250,000 cycle journeys across our 28 live locations in 2024.
Thankfully our cyclists aren't waiting for us to email back anymore!
An underutilized corner of a random car park in Central London…
… Becomes Spokesafe Soho. Which has been utilised by thousands of cyclists across London.
Needs of the operator before the cyclist
Thankfully, we’ve since smoothened out this process, and our system, Spokesafe_OS automatically handles Daily bookings without cyclists waiting on our team to email them back. So, we’ve proven it can be done - but why are Daily bookings not standard at most cycle parking locations?
We think this is down to a few core reasons:
It requires extra effort.
No doubt about it, more cyclists is more effort. It leads to more enquiries, more individuals who have to be set up with access, and unfortunately - more customer service interactions when something doesn’t quite go right. Which does happen from time to time at highly used cycle parking facilities.
This is why most facilities offer very simple booking options, which are usually annually or monthly. This means the operator has to do less chasing up for payment, and can focus on tasks other than cycle parking (which might be fair enough in some instances).
No incentive to do so.
Many operators are paid a flat management fee. This makes sense - it’s easier for them to forecast, and protects them if usage is low at a facility. However, we tend to agree with our partners that we’ll share any revenue a facility generates. This means we’re both incentivised to increase usage as much as possible - and Daily, one-off booking options are a big part of that.
While there might be good reasons for not being incentivised (perhaps the management team have a day job managing a much wider service of which cycle parking is just a small part), this issue means lots of cycle parking facilities end up with booking options which are easy to manage, but hard to change, and with underutilized facilities.
Don’t have the ability to do so
Finally, updating the booking options at a Hub isn’t always easy. Many operators manage their facilities using access cards or fobs, and if they do have an app it’s usually a third party off the shelf solution which isn’t built to handle the short-term dynamic accesses that these facilities really need. Instead, these apps require someone to manually add a user to a facility, and then remove them when their booking has finished. And unfortunately, it’s rare to find a team that’s as devoted/foolish (take your pick) as we are, and willing to go the extra mile to make sure we get one more journey by bike.
The Membership Gap
This gap - between what cyclists want, and what operators can offer - is a shame. We call it the membership gap. And it’s particularly a shame because it doesn’t just lead to less cyclists using a facility, but actually results in changes to the physical infrastructure of cycle parking which slows down behaviour change.
When operators can only offer a monthly or annual membership option this changes not only how a cyclist accesses a facility, but also the cost. Because monthly and annual membership caps limit the number of cyclists who can use a location, the facility now has to be bigger. It needs more racks. More lockers. More space. Or, even worse, people who might want to use the space are prohibited from doing so.
This added cost and scale slows down both how quickly you can launch a facility and where you can launch it from. How many locations are in both a suitable place that cyclists want to go to, and are large enough to house enough cyclists to satisfy current and forecasted demand? Can you make the sums add up, and then convince all the necessary decision-makers that this will really work?
Finally, launching with more spaces means an inevitable story from a local paper a month after launch talking about how few of the racks get used (we know behaviour change takes time guys!).
You can see the challenges that only offering static, long-term memberships cause. And how this slows down the creation of cycle parking networks we desperately need.
Ultimately, the way to overcome this is to create facilities where the total number of racks isn’t the defining factor. Instead, it’s about using limited space as efficiently as possible.
Newport Cycle Hub, which has just 34 spaces, has facilitated over 16,500 journeys in less than 2 years by offering a Daily booking option.
Solution - Spokesafe_OS.
We’ve done the hard work, so that nobody else has too! Every single one of our locations is a partnership, and we’ve designed our system so it can overlay across the different formats we work in. So whether it’s a former retail unit, existing cycle parking structure, or even a hub in a car park, we have created a fully automated, dynamic booking system by installing just a keypad.
Take this example at TfL’s Finsbury Park Cycle Hub. Since installing a keypad to add dynamic bookings back in March, we’ve hosted an additional 593 Daily bookings from 114 individual cyclists, on top of our normal regular members.
This means we can help our partners launch new locations with less money and scale (and then use the granular usage data Spokesafe_OS collects to call for more even cycle parking!) and at an incredibly quick pace.
Our recently opened Moor Cycle Hub in Sheffield is a good example of this - we were able to begin taking bookings in this facility just months after the first discussions with our location partner.
But dynamic booking options like Daily bookings make even more things possible. In locations where demand is smaller, but certainly still there (perhaps on a smaller high street for example) a large Hub might not be feasible. But by placing something smaller, nimble and agile - like a locker - in place, we can still provide secure cycle parking and increase the total number of journeys by bike.
Finsbury Park Cycle Hub - which has had an extra 593 daily bookings since March 2024.
We’re confident that this tweak - simply adding a flexible, short-term booking option - could instantly transform the number of cyclists who regularly access cycle parking units. And in turn, the number of cycle journeys,
So there’s no excuse not to offer one-off Daily bookings moving forwards - it’s time to give cyclists options which actually reflect their travel patterns, not the needs of operators.