If you live or work in and around Westmount, you may have recently seen a new crop of bright orange bikes around town. They’re not Bixis with a livelier paint job, they’re Dropbikes: a dock-less alternative to the ubiquitous grey bike rentals and you can lock up anywhere.

The Toronto-based Dropbike set up 50 of the orange bikes in Westmount at the end of August as part of a pilot project, their first in Quebec.

“We are a smart bike sharing service,” Emmet Meacher, Business Development Manager at Dropbike told MTLinTECH. “We’ve taken all the technology from the dock used by Bixi and other dock bike sharing stations and we’ve put it all in the lock on the bike itself as well as on your smartphone.”

The bikes are dock-less and activated through a smartphone. Scanning a QR code tethers the app to the bike and automatically pops the lock open, after which you’re free to take the bike and ride it around anywhere. Instead of docks, the company positions what they call “havens” in the area. Bikes can be picked up and dropped off at havens, which also make it easier for groups of people wanting to ride together to pick up bikes.

“You can take the bike wherever you would like while you’re renting it, it’s completely yours. You can take it all the way along the West Island or the South Shore or Old Montreal, wherever you want to go. But we ask that if you take a bike to Old Montreal you bring it back to one of the haven locations inside Westmount. Ideally it’s always ending up at the end of the day or the end of that user’s experience at a haven location. In the future we’re going to be charging based on out-of-haven pricing depending on how far or close a person might be to one of the havens. So that’s a development that’s coming.”

By eliminating large docks, Dropbike is able to reduce the overhead cost of what that dock would cost for taxpayers and move those savings to the user.

We are different than Bixi in the sense that we don’t have the large docks, but we still use the area that would be designated for a dock, but we reduce the overhead cost of what that dock would cost for taxpayers and we move those savings to the actual user. That’s how we’re able to provide our bikes at $1 per hour.

In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Pierre Parent, vice-president of marketing at Bixi, said the company is aware of Dropbike’s pilot program in the province, but has no plans to change its operations in the city.

“This system is big in Asia, especially in China, but there has also been a lot of negative reaction to it,” Parent said. “Bikes are abandoned left and right (in the city) when people don’t bring them back to specific areas.”

He also pointed out that Amsterdam has recently banned the type of service Dropbike is offering.

But so far, the pilot program seems to working out well and attracting users. There are currently about 20 haven locations in Westmount for the 50 bikes.

“It’s going really well, we’re seeing good adoption,” said Meacher. “Westmount’s a really cool city because lots of people commute outside for work and whatnot, so we’ve really enjoyed it. We’re seeing pretty good user adoption. It’s a little bit of a hilly area, which is an interesting thing to work through. But we’re seeing people coming back to it over and over again. It’s going really well.”

Photos courtesy of Dropbike