Intelligent Transport Podcast Episode 8 – Philip Ellis, Beryl

As urban transport networks become increasingly multimodal, there are any number of new mobility services available to customers, from shared bikes and scooters to on-demand bus and ride-hailing services, with start-ups and success stories coming in all varieties of shapes and sizes.

Beryl is an example of a micromobility company built very much from the ground up, from beginnings as a bike accessories manufacturer known as Blaze, to a bike-sharing company that won its first contract to operate in New York at the end of 2019, and is set to launch e-bikes across the UK shortly.

In this episode, Beryl CEO Philip Ellis explains how the company’s start as an accessories manufacturer has informed the way it operates bike-share services, and how it’s helped to put safety and rider experience first.

Alongside this, Philip goes into detail on how the bike-share firm has based its operating practices on what cities want from their operators, explaining Beryl’s ‘bay-to-bay’ system and the importance to the urban landscape of deploying ‘bays’ over ‘docks’.

There’s also discussion of how this work and the company’s short history led to Beryl being awarded the contract to operate as the only bike-share service in New York’s Staten Island, as well as how the current situation with regards to COVID-19 has impacted that implementation, and services elsewhere.

This recording took place before the COVID-19 lockdown began – all information accurate at time of recording.

Biography

As Co-Founder of Beryl, Philip Ellis has helped lead the business as a manufacturer of innovative consumer cycling products, to a global product and technology business supplying retail and bike-share systems. In 2019 Beryl launched its innovative bike-sharing systems and now deliver services to towns and cities across the UK.