On sustainable mobility: Uber Bike by Jump is affordable, reliable transportation that looks smart, too

Imagine a future where everyone, regardless of their income or where they live, has access to affordable, reliable transportation. The future is now.

During a recent visit to Seattle, it struck me that on nearly every downtown street corner – and especially near the trendy W Hotel (1112 4th Avenue, corner Seneca Street) where I stayed – there was an abundance of smart and safe red Uber Bike by Jump bicycles, a dockless, bike share option that is built of the smartest technology platform in micro-mobility.

The latest generation of these flashy, pedal-assist electric Jump bikes includes a lot of likable and useful features: phone mount, front dashboard, swappable battery and cable lock. Now, riders can use their smart phones for navigation hands free. The swappable battery ensures that bikes are readily available and charged and the cable lock is a good, flexible safety measure that enables bikes to be secured to a rack or permanent structure.

With a smarter and safer fleet of bikes offering its users an optimum performance experience, it will be interesting to see if these sleek Jump bikes, like the ones I saw in Seattle, become commonplace in other urban cities. Upon returning home to Washington, D.C., I started noticing more of them in and around the Capitol Hill and Eastern Market areas of the city as well as near Union Station. Like Seattle, in Washington, D.C., the target demo seems to be under-30-year-old Millennials.

Uber Bike by Jump are available in the following U.S. cities: Atlanta, Austin, Texas; Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Phoenix, Providence, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Calif.; Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Recently, Nick Foley, Jump’s head of product, was quoted by bikebiz.com as saying “With 4G connectivity, the booking experience – whether reserving remotely or walking up to a bike – is much faster. The ride experience is more reliable, since the bike can now self-diagnose its most common failures.

“And with full connectivity for all on-board vehicle systems, our fleets will be smarter and safer over time, as we use the live diagnostic data from each vehicle to uniquely optimize its performance with algorithms running in our cloud.”

Certainly, with Uber’s ability to mobilize its Jump bikes and place them in locations where they’ll enjoy a high profile, users should never have to trek too far to rent one.

Last fall, Uber announced it was committing $10 million over three years to support sustainable mobility in New York and other cities in which it operates. On Monday, the Sacramento Bee reported that an October study “found more Sacramentans were renting Jump bikes than using Uber’s car service by a 53 to 47 percent margin. That makes Sacramento, Calif., the first of 16 Uber cities that have both bike and car service where the bikes are more popular, company officials said.”

In cities with good weather, a flat terrain and a pro-bike mindset, it certainly looks like Jump bikes are here to stay.

Photo: Uber Bike by Jump by Michael Dickens, © Seattle, 2019.

A commentary: How long will we accept weapons of war being used to slaughter our nation's children?

On Wednesday, President Trump did not address the nation after the Florida high school shooting that left at least 17 dead. While his advisors recommended he say something in the aftermath of the latest horrific mass shooting in America, such as what President Obama did back in December 2012 in dealing with the Sandy Hook Elementary horror in which a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut – a moment he later said in a TV interview was the worst day of his presidency – this President opted not to. Mr. Trump remained silent, hiding behind his Twitter account.

While we have become tired of the empty gestures and platitudes which come with each new national tragedy, it seems that we as a nation should be disturbed by this President, who always wants to provoke, never reassure or commiserate like President Obama did so eloquently more than once during his eight-year stewardship of the White House.

Yesterday, before his team's NBA game in Portland, Oregon – just hours after the Florida shooting – Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who has always been open about his views on politics, addressed the matter of gun violence head on – unlike our current commander-in-chief. Kerr spoke out passionately about the need to find a way to curtail gun violence in the United States.

"It doesn't seem to matter to our government that children are being shot to death day after day in schools. It doesn't matter that people are being shot at a concert, in a movie theater. It's not enough apparently to move our leadership – our government – the people who are running this country to actually do anything. That's demoralizing," said Kerr.

Mind you, gun violence is a deeply personal issue for Kerr, whose father, Malcolm H. Kerr, was assassinated in 1984 by two gunmen outside his office in Beirut, Lebanon, where he was president of the American University of Beirut.

"We can actually do something about it. We can vote people in who actually have the courage to protect people's lives and not just bow down to the NRA because they've financed their campaign for them," said Kerr.

"Hopefully, we'll find enough people, first of all, to vote good people in, but hopefully, we can find people with courage to help our citizens remain safe and focus on the real safety issues. Not building some stupid wall for billions of dollars that has nothing to do with our safety, but actually protecting us from what truly is dangerous, which is maniacs with semi-automatic weapons just slaughtering our children. It's disgusting."

Video: Courtesy of YouTube.