City to add 400 more electric Indego bikes

After a successful test run, Philly plans to expand an electric bikeshare pilot program, bringing 400 more electric Indego bikes to city streets.

The city-run bikeshare, Indego, will start rolling out the bikes later this month, along with 12 new Indego stations which will be installed at the “busiest parts of the Indego system,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.

The e-bikes will cost an additional 15 cents per minute. However, Indego ACCESS pass holders can ride the bikes for five cents a minute, the statement clarified.

Indego has been a staple in Philly for the past four years, as the city’s only bikeshare program. But it wasn’t until November that the city added e-bikes to the system. They deposited only 10 e-bikes at various Indego stations around the city and monitored their usage over the course of two months to consider bringing them to Philly permanently.

The bikes have a motor that, “adds power to the wheels as riders pedal up to 17 mph,” the city said in a statement last year.

“Adding more electric bikes to the fleet will help address several barriers and open the door for new cyclists who may not have considered using Indego before,” Waffiyyah Murray, Better Bike Share Partnership’s program manager said in the statement last week.