GPS-Enabled Company Bike Fleet
Challenge
How does a company efficiently protect its fleet of bikes from loss and theft?
Solution
Equip bikes with GPS tracking and manage the fleet from a phone, tablet or laptop.
LinkedIn has long allowed employees to zip around campus on its company bikes. The grab-and-go convenience just made good business sense: Biking to lunch and meetings instead of walking cuts travel time by 60%, meaning employees have more time to get things done. But as the Silicon Valley tech company opened distant new buildings, its bikes—which remain unlocked and ready to be ridden during the day—started to disappear.
When it came time to replace the fleet, Bikes Make Life Better helped LinkedIn select and implement bikes with GPS to better manage retention and maintenance.
The GPS system tracks the location of each bike and populates a dashboard so the bike staff (Bikes Make Life Better employees, who work onsite for LinkedIn), can see how and where the bikes move. It also makes corralling and locking bikes at the end of the workday quick and painless.
Results
“From a security point of view, it’s been fantastic,” says Michael Alba, LinkedIn’s Global Transportation Manager. “The other cool part is the metrics you get on how the smart bikes are being used. It’s fascinating to see how many trips people take, how many miles they travel, when and where they use them—the data is rich.”
Everyone on the bike staff is able to manage the fleet from their phones, tablets, or laptops. They now know where bikes are at all times and which bikes are in use, and whether Bikes that stray off-campus send instant alerts to the staff.
The investment has more than paid for itself: Since LinkedIn added GPS to their bikes, its loss rate has plummeted from 70 percent down to 4 percent. Not to mention the extra sleep fleet managers get now that they know where all their bikes are.
Read more about the GPS & locking systems we like best on the Bikes Make Life Better blog: Smart bikes make for better bikeshare
