Beryl’s new fleet of e-bikes now available for hire in Hereford

Credit: Beryl

Beryl has announced that a new fleet of 47 e-bikes are being made available to hire across Hereford’s scheme area via the Beryl app, with further e-bikes to be added over the coming weeks, making it a total of 200 bikes and 104 e-bikes available for users in the city.

The e-bikes can be hired from and returned to any of the existing 69 ‘Beryl Bays’ that are located across the city. Currently, 55,000 people are just a five minutes (or less) walk from a bay, which represents 90% of the service area’s population.

Beryl CEO and Co-Founder, Phil Ellis, said: “With its multiple modes, Hereford is a great example of how delivering a range of services can better contribute towards the aims of an integrated transport network. E-bikes are a really fun and versatile way to travel and their extra power can really open up areas, enabling riders to tackle hills and undertake longer journeys. They’re also great for commuting, helping to reduce physical exertion and allowing people to arrive at work clean and ready to go.”

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Councillor John Harrington, Cabinet Member for Infrastructure and Transport, said: “We are very pleased to be welcoming these new e-bikes to the city’s already popular scheme. The figures show that, since launch, our fleet of Beryls have been a real asset, with over quarter of a million individual journeys made, helping to save over nine tonnes of CO2 emissions.”

Beryl had initially launched its services in Hereford in July 2019 with 75 bikes, eventually rising to 200 bikes with an additional 30 e-bikes added in March 2021.

Since launching, the scheme has proven to be very popular, generating almost 290,000 journeys over 687,000km, the equivalent of over 17 journeys around the Earth. In addition, based on 4,125 responses, 28.1% of these journeys would have otherwise have been made using a car, motorbike or taxi/Uber.

Furthermore, according to industry calculations, the journeys that have been taken so far have saved over 35 tonnes of CO2 emissions.