Portsmouth e-bike scheme showcases exemplary public-private cooperation

Having moved from competing e-scooter and e-bike services to a single-operator micromobility scheme, Portsmouth offers a compelling UK case study. This article showcases how modern vehicles, public-private cooperation and good levels of parking can drive growth while maintaining designated parking racks and a tidy public realm.

The UK’s experience with bike share has been mixed. Despite millions in public investment, several schemes have closed in recent years, especially those with fixed “lock-in” stations, in cities including Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leicester.

Marcus Miller, Senior Market Development Manager, Voi

The challenges faced by previous bike-share schemes in the UK include:

• High levels of public investment not justified by low ridership: Some cities were subsidising each ride at a significant cost. For example, Edinburgh spent £2.3 million on its public bike hire scheme, Just Eat Cycles. There were just 420k rides before the scheme collapsed due to vandalism, meaning each ride received a subsidy of £5–6.
• Low user uptake, often due to competition from alternative options like e-scooters, made many schemes unsustainable.
  “In a lot of cases (Slough, Liverpool) they were running quite successfully, and then an e-scooter provider came in, and quite quickly the scheme became unsustainable,” explains Marcus Miller, Senior Market Development Manager, Voi.
• City-specific factors: low cycling rates, high car dependency and limited cycling infrastructure (including parking) made it difficult to grow ridership, as docked bikes could not compete with the flexibility of car use.

These challenges led to several schemes shutting down or failing to achieve financial sustainability, despite large initial investments and attempts to adapt, often because the city was taking on significant financial exposure.

As an island city, Portsmouth offered some natural advantages for bike share. It is compact and densely populated, is home to a large student population and attracts a significant number of tourists.

In 2024, around 5% of journeys were made by bike or scooter, above England’s average but below leading UK and European cities such as Cambridge (18%), Oxford (14%) and Amsterdam (35%). Meanwhile, 52% of trips were made by car, which can reduce the perceived safety of micromobility (statistics from the Transport for the South East Regional Travel Survey, 2024).

VPortsmouth’s first publicly funded bike and e-bike scheme launched in 2022 as part of the wider UK Government-backed Future Transport Zone (FTZ) programme, which aimed to test whether new transport services could support sustainable mode shift.

Ridership did not pick up as expected, so in 2024 the council sought to appoint a single operator for a multi-modal scheme covering both e-bikes and e-scooters.

The new contract included some FTZ subsidy for the launch phase, which reduced the risk to the operator and helped ensure that the e-bike element was attractive, especially given the low usage of the previous scheme.

Voi Technology, operator of Portsmouth’s e-scooter scheme since 2021, was awarded the contract in 2024 as the next phase of the FTZ micromobility programme in the Solent. Since switching to a single operator for both modes, Portsmouth’s approach now stands out as an exemplary model of how public-private partnerships can deliver positive outcomes for councils, residents and shared mobility operators.

E-bikes take off in Portsmouth

When Voi took over e-bikes in Portsmouth and became the sole micromobility operator for e-scooters and e-bikes, users benefited from a unified app, unified pricing, a single parking network and a refreshed fleet.

Voi has introduced a mandatory parking-based e-bike system, using its bespoke RNIB-approved parking racks, which provides more flexibility than schemes with fixed locking stations and is cheaper to scale.

Since launching in early 2024, Portsmouth’s new e-bike fleet has outperformed all expectations:

• 4 trips per vehicle per day
• 139,000 rides in nine months, surpassing the 42,000 rides previously achieved over 18 months
• E-bikes outperforming e-scooters in trips per vehicle per day

“We’re getting a huge amount more trips per vehicle per day: 12 times what the previous scheme got,” says Marcus Miller. “Our bikes are actually outperforming the scooters in terms of trips per vehicle per day, which is quite uncommon across the industry.”

Trips grew steadily through 2025, peaking at nearly 25,000 monthly rides in August before stabilising in autumn 2025.

According to Miller, factors that have contributed to Portsmouth’s turnaround include:

• Parking density: an increase from 100 to 220 parking areas for e-bikes, more than doubling parking density.
• Scooter parity: the bikes have the same app, pricing and parking zones as scooters.
• Reliable vehicles: Voi has deployed sturdy electric dual-gear models.
• Infrastructure: new cycle lanes have been built and new parking added on both the footway and the carriageway.
• Cultural shift: growing comfort with shared mobility across the UK.

“The parking network density has been really important, because if it is uneven between the two different modes [scooters and bikes], you’re going to favour one mode over the other,” comments Miller. “The vehicles have been vital in retaining riders, and the ‘seed subsidy’, you could call it, has basically allowed us to share the risk with the city.”

The estimated lifetime subsidy per ride is just 15p, around fifty times more efficient than many legacy UK schemes.

Key takeaways

• E-scooters and e-bikes need a level playing field.
• Dense parking networks are crucial to accessibility.
• Reliable, high-quality vehicles retain riders.
• Minimal ‘seed’ subsidy allows operators and authorities to share risk.
• Portsmouth now has one of the highest-demand bike-share fleets.

“Portsmouth has become one of the best-performing cities, and I think the conclusion in the UK is that we’re seeing tenders where lots of cities are now interested in more flexible parking models for their e-bike and e-scooter schemes,” says Miller.

Overall, the results and ridership levels in Portsmouth highlight the value of experimentation and testing to identify what works. They also demonstrate the important role of public funding in helping authorities and operators find better ways to serve residents. Voi now applies the lessons learned in Portsmouth across its UK markets, whilst Portsmouth City Council continues to find ways to drive sustainable mode shift.

Main photo: Portsmouth City Council / Voi