Is AirDonkey The Uber For Bicycles? This Danish Startup Sure Hopes So

on September 14, 2015 at 4:30 pm

A Copenhagen-based start-up is looking to raise funds for a new bike hire mobile app.

The Guardian reports that the firm behind the project, Donkey Republic, have successfully tested the system around Copenhagen. The next step involves looking to raise about €100,000 of funding via Kickstarter.

This hopes to be as much of what co-founder Erdem Ovacik calls “a movement” for more liveable, bike-filled cities as a commercial company.

The basic idea involves letting people with spare or little-used bikes rent them out by the day or week to those who need one, whether for tourism, commuting or anything else.

Before a bike can be made available for hire, it must be “donkified”, which is expected to cost around €80. That includes a special rear-wheel lock, an information panel which you affix to the handlebars, and stickers marking the bike and a listing on the website.

The website keeps a track of available bikes’ locations via the lock and users can then release them via the mobile phone app. There is a daily rental charge of about €10 in places like London and Copenhagen.

“We’re a new bike-sharing service that’s going to disrupt urban transport,” Ovacik says. “We want to also kind of have a political advocacy side of things: how can cities become more bike friendly? And this is where Copenhagen really is a benchmark.”

AirDonkey hopes to be an “Uber for bicycles”, he says: “You could see it as a Scandinavian reply to the American way of doing things with Uber. Of course, these are very ambitious words. But that’s the vision.”