Washington, D.C.-based bike-share startup Baas Bikes has had to pull out of the University of Maryland in a near textbook example of what happens when great ideas mix with bad timing and poor communication.
"We see Baas as the future of on-demand bikes, but we decided it would be polite to stop operating on campus before any formal cease-or-desist order came," Baas Bikes CEO Rob McPherson told me in an interview. "But we really want to be at UMd."
"We see Baas as the future of on-demand bikes."
The idea that UMd's campus should be more bike friendly seems inoffensive enough and Baas, operated out of 1776, applies a mix of Capital Bikeshare and UberX to appeal to college students. The bikes are located via an app, which uses bluetooth to lock and unlock the rented bike. Users can make money if they own a bike and sign up to rent it out on the system when not using it. There is no other special hardware and the pricing system is deliberately kept very simple with a cost of $1 an hour.
"We've seen some real success at the University of Miami," Baas CTO Justin Molineaux explained in an interview. "We were starting to see traction at Maryland too."
The problem is that Baas started operating on the campus without first actually talking to UMd about doing so. The company reached out to students to test the service out, building up interest and a potential user base.
"At first we thought it was a student project, a capstone group building bike-locking tech," said Anna McLaughlin, the assistant director of UMd's department of transportation services. "Then we found out it was a whole company."
Baas hadn't gotten permission to have its tech connected to UMd's bike racks, and doing so anyway isn't allowed, McLaughlin said. The racks are property of the university and the school is allowed to decide what bikes are allowed there.
At the same time, UMd has its own plan to use a tech startup to boost bike usage on campus. Thanks to grants from local and state government, UMd has signed a three-year contracted with Cambridge, Ma.-based Zagster to bring 125 bikes connected to 14 stations around campus and the surrounding city. Similar to Baas, Zagster uses a smartphone app to lock and unlock the bikes, but it's not a system that people can use to share their own bikes. That gives more control over quality to the company and school, but McLaughlin admitted that the 125 aren't going to make a dent in bike usage all alone.
"We're hoping it will grow," McLaughlin said. "We're losing three thousand parking spaces over the next two years, so we'll need more options as alternatives for driving."
As for Baas, Molineaux referred to the current situation as a "vendor dispute," and one that he is eager to resolve. The philosophy of forgiveness being easier to ask for than permission has certainly worked for other startups looking to disrupt a system, but it may be tricky to apply to college campuses. Still, with the obvious need for encouraging people to use bikes at UMd, Baas isn't giving up hope yet.
"I really can't imagine why they wouldn't want us there," Molineaux said. "I hope we can figure something out. We really want to be at UMd."
