Love Cincinnati's nonprofit bike share, but find yourself needing a little help getting up the Queen City's gargantuan hills? You're in luck.
Cincy Red Bike yesterday announced it is rolling out electronic-assist bicycles that give your pedaling a gentle push up to 17 miles per hour. The bike share nonprofit held a demonstration of the bikes today outside City Hall, and will continue to have pop-up events showing off the new bikes up until the launch of the pilot program Nov. 5.
The pilot will feature 10 of the e-bikes, which Red Bike will use to test battery performance, maintenance needs, pricing and other variables before launching its full fleet of 100 e-bikes next year. Those bikes will be funded in part by a federal grant awarded by the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments and money from the City of Cincinnati.
Red Bike has been working for two years to add e-bikes to their inventory. The test e-bikes are white, but the final versions will likely be red, just like the traditional bicycles Red Bike offers.
Red Bike currently has 57 stations and 440 bikes in Cincinnati, Covington, Bellevue and Newport and is raising money to eventually expand into Avondale, Bond Hill, the West End, Lower Price Hill and other neighborhoods.
