With Benoît Yameundjeu, General Manager at Smoove-Zoov
Smoove-Zoov are two French companies and providers of self-service bicycles that have merged to form a new entity. Smoove & Zoov design and provide the hardware, bicycles, stations and the software to run a self-service bicycle system.
The innovation of the light station developed by Zoov
It features several innovations, including:
- Its compactness: the concept of the Zoov station, unlike conventional stations that include a dock per bike, is that there is only one bike attached to the dock and the rest of the bikes attach to each other. This helps to reduce the land use quite significantly. “Today we can fit 10 bikes in a parking space, so it’s a station that is 3 to 4 times more compact than traditional Velib-type stations,” explains Benoît. It is a station that manages the recharging of all the bikes which transmit energy to each other.
- The speed at which stations are installed: the zoov station is easily fixed to the ground. The installation of a 15-bike station takes 30 minutes, not including the electrical connection. As such, there is very little construction and the station offers quite a lot of flexibility in the potential of connection to the network.