Bangert: Purdue-born bike share program loses its ride on campus VeoRide, deployed in West Lafayette in 2017, will pick up its bikes soon as Purdue gives Zagster an exclusive ride for the next three years

Dave Bangert | Journal & Courier

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If there were any lingering hard feelings as VeoRide, a startup straight out of Purdue University, prepared to round up its distinctive teal bikes this week and tell customers that its fledgling bike share program wouldn’t be around campus any more, no one was sharing publicly.

Starting Aug. 1, there will be one bike share program on campus.

A contract with Zagster, which brought the bike share concept to Purdue three years ago, kicks in that day, giving the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company exclusive rights for the pay-to-ride system on the West Lafayette campus.

So, VeoRide, born at a university-sponsored entrepreneur center on a campus mad about nurturing startups and commercialization of Purdue-born ideas, will round up bikes deployed in fall 2017 and put them on campuses elsewhere.

“Obviously, they don’t have the contract to operate,” said Linda Jackson, a spokeswoman for the West Lafayette-based VeoRide. “So they’re planning to go ahead and go to the markets that have a need for bikes. They’ll redeploy those that were in the West Lafayette area to their new locations.”

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Purdue extended its contract with Zagster in March to supply bikes and upkeep on and around campus.

When Zagster first came to campus in 2015, Purdue paid the company $160,000 to bring 200 bikes that students, faculty and other customers could use on a subscription basis. Customers could pay a $35 annual subscription fee and then take a Zagster bike from any rack on campus and ride for two hours, for no additional cost, and then pay $2 an hour beyond that. Or riders could get a one-time, 24-hour pass for $5.

The average Zagster ride was 60 minutes, based on roughly 50,000 rides in the first two years, according to Aaron Madrid, alternative transportation coordinator at Purdue.

VeoRide entered the scene in October 2017, co-founded by Candice Xie, a graduate of the Krannert School of Management, and Edwin Tan, who graduated from Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering.

Xie and Tan made their home campus the pilot for its bike share concept, which differed from Zagster in a few key ways. Starting quietly at first with 20 bikes tested by friends, VeoRide deployed a pay-as-you-go system that required no subscription fee and utilized no set bike racks. That meant anyone could find one of VeoRide’s bikes via the company’s mapping system, unlock it through the Bluetooth system on their smartphones and pay 50 cents for each 15 minutes. The bikes could be left anywhere once a customer was done.

In October 2017, Xie and Tan put 160 bikes on West Lafayette streets, took their VeoRide app live and invited riders to head to campus. The project received big fanfare from Purdue Foundry, a commercialization accelerator managed by Purdue Research Foundation in Discovery Park’s Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. Purdue Research Foundation is a nonprofit real estate and commercialization organization that works on behalf of Purdue’s interests.

Promotion materials prominently featured Purdue, including a main home page photo of two riders against the backdrop of the Purdue Memorial Union.

VeoRide did not have a formal agreement with Purdue. And Purdue’s agreement with Zagster – during the first three years and in the three-year contract that will start Aug. 1 – didn’t specify what the company or university would do if other companies’ bike share bikes were found on campus.

Jackson did not release VeoRide ridership numbers over the past 10 months. She said that Xie and Tan “in broad terms have been pleased with the support they received from their customers.”

In that time, VeoRide scored contracts with the University of Kansas and a handful of other campuses. Jackson said VeoRide will launch service in 10 other places in the next three months, including the University of Arkansas, Texas State University, University of Illinois and the city of Austin.

Madrid said VeoRide’s launch guided, in a way, a new bike share contract.

First, a model that didn’t cost Purdue any money up front was something the university pursued. Madrid said Zagster, about to rebrand itself as Pace for its second iteration at Purdue, agreed to that.

Second, having a second set of bikes on campus showed that a burgeoning bike share market – “It’s just going insane right now,” Madrid said – needed to be managed.

“If nothing else, we knew as soon as VeoRide launched and all these other bike share companies were just kind of showing up places and doing what the (motorized) scooter companies are doing now, we had to get ahead of it,” Madrid said.

On scooters, he was referring to the ones deployed on campuses and cities – including Indianapolis – leading to numerous complaints about scooters being left randomly on sidewalks and users causing problems for traffic and pedestrians. (Of note: Scooter companies have come to Purdue with ideas for service in West Lafayette. He didn’t say whether that would ever happen at Purdue.)

“We knew no matter whether we stuck with Zagster or we moved to VeoRide or went with somebody completely different, we wanted an exclusivity clause, because we didn’t want to have what’s happening in a lot of other cities happen here,” Madrid said. “Nobody really wins if there are just tons of bikes everywhere from tons of different vendors and there’s very little control when dealing with operational issues on the ground.”

Zagster’s contract calls for 200 new Pace bikes on campus, with up to 300 total across Purdue, West Lafayette and Lafayette.

Jackson said VeoRide plans to keep its headquarters in West Lafayette.

But whether there’s animosity over being aced out by Purdue’s renegotiation with Zagster, VeoRide wasn’t biting.

Jackson said Xie and Tan preferred to quietly move on.

At PRF, where startup success is measured on a regular basis, Cynthia Sequin, a PRF spokeswoman, said VeoRide was still a client of the Purdue Foundry, which would “provide the same services it provides to other clients.”

There also was no word whether the Purdue Memorial Union would remain as the backdrop for VeoRide, a company conceived on campus but no longer part of it.

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.