Londoners Flock to Rent Bikes With a Bright Blue Tire and Antitheft Guarantee

Swapfiets signed up 3,000 users in four months.

Thousands in the British capital are renting Dutch-style bikes from Swapfiets. (Bloomberg)

A new group has joined London's busy bike messengers, style-conscious Rapha riders and Lycra-clad urban cyclists as they cruise through town. Thousands in the British capital are renting Dutch-style bikes from Swapfiets, a company started in the Netherlands in 2014. It signed up 3,000 UK customers to its service over just four months this summer.

Each bike has a relaxed, upright riding style with a hands-free coaster brake. For a flat fee starting at £17 per month ($19), customers can choose among four models, including e-bikes, designed to suit needs ranging from casual weekend bicyclists to dedicated delivery riders who rack up thousands of miles each month. Lights and locks are included in the price, along with a guarantee that the company will fix or repair any problems, such as a flat tire, within 48 hours.

If a bike is stolen—not uncommon in London—Swapfiets customers pay a modest surcharge of £40 and get a new bike. To return the bike, you just give a month's notice and drop it back at the shop near Spitalfields in East London, the company's first location in the city. Katarina Hlavata, 27, Swapfiets's UK manager, says only about 20 bikes a month have been reported stolen in London. That's 0.6% of their total subscriptions.

Customers say they like the all-inclusive approach. Molly Alter, 28, who works for venture capital firm Index Ventures SA, was an early adopter of Swapfiets (pronounced: “swap-feets”) when she moved to London from the US, signing up to rent a bike in March 2021. “I was pretty new to the city, and I worried about investing in a bike and not using it, or losing it if it got stolen,” she says.

Alter bought another brand of electric bike, Cowboy, but is still using her pedal-powered Swapfiets. Her boyfriend says she should get rid of it, but she's keeping it for now. “It's so convenient not to have to worry about it being stolen,” she says.

Hlavata says she's signed up 3,200 customers, adding 3,000 in the four months between June and September 2022. That's speedy progress compared with London's bike-sharing program Santander Cycles, which has added 12,000 bikes since 2010, and intense competition from rivals such as Uber Lime, Buzzbikes and Human Forest.

Hlavata says the company's success is due in part to a design decision: Swapfiets bikes have an eye-catching blue front tire. The choice was made by the founders to make their bikes more recognizable on the street and as a nod to the famous blue Delftware pottery from Delft, Netherlands, where the company was founded.

The antitheft guarantee means customers feel comfortable leaving them locked up outside, and Hlavata says her aim is to have a Swapfiets—fiets is “bicycle” in Dutch, so Swapbicycle—with a blue front wheel locked on every bike rack in London.

Richard Burger, 29, Swapfiets co-founder and director, says the company was drawn to London because of the city's investment in cycling infrastructure during the pandemic. “Covid opened a window of opportunity for us to go to London quicker than we had planned,” he says. Swapfiets has been most popular so far in Southwark, Islington and Hackney, areas that are known for local government investment in separate bike lanes and for a concentration of young professionals.

The company's model has attracted 280,000 paying bike members so far in nine countries across Europe, starting in the Netherlands, and expanding to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and now the UK. It's been particularly successful in cycling-friendly cities such as Amsterdam, which has 60,000 paying members among the city's 1 million residents. More than 60,000 have also signed up in Germany.

The company says it needs 5,000 paying members in one area to prove the model can work, which then triggers the company's expansion to new cities and towns. Burger is confident it will grow past that number in London.

Swapfiets secured investment from Pon Bicycle Group in 2019—part of Dutch conglomerate Pon Holdings BV—to help fund its expansion, but Burger says the company always aims to grow sustainably and doesn't lend out its bikes below cost. He says rental prices are based on the “high quality” of their bikes. (A rival to the most expensive Swapfiets e-bike in London is the Zoomo e-bike, which retails for £2,200.)

Most customers ride the cheaper pedal-powered Original and Deluxe 7 models, but delivery riders using powerful e-bikes are an increasing source of revenue for Swapfiets.

The company introduced the Power 7 e-bike with a range of up to 100 kilometers in March, in part to attract Deliveroo and Uber Eats delivery workers. These users like the fact that maintenance is included in the cost, although if they want to use the bikes for commercial purposes or for longer rides, they must pay more for a “heavy-use” subscription.

Swapfiets is looking at mileage-based pricing for such customers, to allay what Burger says are “higher costs in maintaining the bikes.” It processes about 100 repairs in a typical week with its staff of five mechanics in London. One way the company keeps costs down is by repairing and reusing almost every bike part. It claims to refurbish and reuse 88% of the parts, with only 3% of its repairs producing any waste.

The company says bike thieves are less of a problem than absent-minded customers who leave the country without telling Swapfiets or returning their bike. Swapfiets employs staff to do “city sweeps” to recover any that come up as missing or stolen.

There's been one hitch with the UK rollout: British Swapfiets customers aren't used to the coaster brake, a feature unique to Dutch bikes that slows the bike by backpedaling and replaces the brake lever typically found on the left handle.

Nathan Shipp, 28, warehouse and logistics manager, is responsible for keeping the fleet of thousands of Swapfiets bikes on the road, and his team logs data about every repair. Those logs showed that Londoners “only use the front brake. They don't use that back pedal brake.” (Backpedal brakes are so common in the Netherlands that many Dutch bikes don't have a front brake.)

Swapfiets has no plans to put the brakes on its UK expansion. The company is in touch with local governments in Birmingham and Manchester, and is especially interested in cycling-friendly cities including Cambridge and Oxford.

Burger says he welcomes more competition from other bike rental companies. “I think it's good that multiple subscription bike models enter this scene,” he says. “For me, it makes a much prettier city if you have more cyclists than car traffic jams all over the place. More cars are never the solution. It's very energizing to see bikes in London and every now and then a blue tire passing by.”

Look around: You'll probably start noticing the blue tires. Just make sure you keep a watchful eye for Brits grappling with the brakes.