JUMP Bikes

» see jump.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ryan rzepecki founded social bicycles in 2010, working out of new york, with a simple idea: instead of putting smart locks on docks, put the smart lock on each bike. the bike could be left at any city bike rack and unlocked from a phone. it was a small operation through the early 2010s with municipal-pilot deployments in santa monica and a handful of other us cities.

the rebrand to jump came in january 2018, with the addition of a 250-watt motor on the rear wheel and the bright red-orange paint scheme. san francisco gave jump a permit in february 2018 for dockless e-bikes through the uber app and uber bought the company outright in april 2018 for a price reported around 200 million. for two years jump was uber's bike line: bright red 70-pound bikes in 13 us cities and in berlin, paris, london, lisbon and rome.

covid changed the picture. uber cut 14 percent of staff in may 2020 and decided to exit micromobility operations. on may 7 it transferred jump's operating business to lime as part of a 170 million dollar investment in lime, retaining a stake but not the day-to-day. the catch was that lime only took the bikes it intended to keep deploying. tens of thousands of older-model bikes did not transfer. they were shipped to scrap-metal yards and crushed, with phones recording the process. the cnn business story on 29 may 2020 ran with footage of functional 1500-dollar e-bikes being demolished in a pulping machine, frames intact. the public reaction was widely negative.

i was not in any jump city. by 2020 i was in ankara working on edge ai for unmanned aerial vehicles, and the closest thing to dockless e-bikes in turkey was the slowly-arriving scooter operators (marti, palet) in istanbul. the jump moment was a us / western-european urban-mobility moment, peaking in 2019 and ending on video the following may. what stuck with me was the footage itself. the bikes were not broken. the contract just said scrap them.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hardware ~

the bike was overbuilt. a 70-pound aluminum frame designed to survive being thrown sideways onto pavement, an integrated u-lock that pinned the rear wheel to any rack, a 250-watt rear hub motor with a removable battery rated for around 30 miles per charge, gps and cellular built in. it was easily the most durable consumer e-bike on american streets in 2019. cyclists who rode the model casually estimated it could last fifteen years with normal use.

that durability is what made the scrap-yard footage so damning. these were not end-of-life bikes being recycled because they were broken. they were inventory that did not fit into the post-sale operating cost lime was willing to absorb. the bike-share museum project tried to negotiate the rescue of a few hundred bikes for refurbishment and donation. uber declined.

~ the postmortem ~

the deal closed may 7 2020 with a press release that talked about a stronger combined micromobility business. the scrap-yard videos started appearing online by may 26. uber's official statement claimed the scrapped bikes had not been deployed for consumer use and that maintenance and liability concerns made recycling them the responsible choice. former jump employees told cnn business and vice that this was not accurate, that the bikes being destroyed included recently-active deployment inventory.

the bike-share museum has a partial inventory of jump units that escaped through grey-market resale and worker rescue. the recycling argument got reframed in the press as a parable about contract-driven waste. uber declined further comment.

~ what got buried ~

the lime operation kept the jump brand on a smaller subset of cities into 2021 before phasing it out completely. some of the surviving jump-branded bikes were rebadged lime. the bright red-orange paint scheme is gone from us streets. the larger pattern (a venture-funded micromobility operator buys hardware, deploys it for two years, exits with the hardware as collateral damage) has repeated several times since: lime scrapped older inventory in 2021 quietly, and bird went through hardware purges before its own bankruptcy. the jump moment was the first time the public got to watch it happen on video.

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