New York Startup Wants to Fix New York Bike Parking with Free, Secure Storage Pods

On a typical weekday before the coronavirus pandemic, tens of thousands of commuters passed through the Journal Square train station in Jersey City on their way to and from New York City. The station is one of the busiest on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH, train line that runs under the river between New York and New Jersey. Last spring, during the height of the lockdown, ridership through Journal Square plummeted to less than 3,000 people per day and has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Erin Vinson, a 34-year-old who works as a training coordinator at a safety school for construction workers, is one of those still using the station. On weekday mornings, Vinson rides her electric scooter about a mile from her apartment to Journal Square and then takes the PATH to downtown Manhattan. Her scooter stays behind in Jersey City, locked in a shelter on the sidewalk outside the station. Each morning, Vinson swipes a card to unlock the door to the shelter — a perforated aluminum hut, wrapped in advertising for a nearby burger shop and topped with potted plants — and leaves her scooter alongside the few bikes also parked inside. “It’s a brilliant idea,” Vinson says of the system. “Everything about it is easy.”

The parking hut is operated by a startup called Oonee (pronounced ooh-nee, after the Japanese word for sea urchin), which builds modular parking shelters, called pods, for bikes and scooters. Shabazz Stuart, a 31-year-old Brooklyn native, came up with the idea for Oonee in 2015, while working for a business improvement district in the borough. He was commuting by bicycle — about a two-and-half-mile trip from his apartment in Crown Heights to downtown — and had his bike stolen three times in a span of five years. After the third, Stuart decided there had to be a better way. So he and co-founder J. Manuel Mansylla began working on designs for a modular parking pod that wouldn’t create an eyesore on a city sidewalk.

“We need to give people secure bike parking,” Stuart says, “and not just one or two spots.” For now the Oonee pod in Jersey City is one of two; the other sits at the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn near the Barclays Center arena. On Thursday the company announced plans to install two mini pods in New York City this spring. Swedish scooter sharing company Voi, one of the bidders currently seeking a contract to operate scooters in New York, has agreed to pay $25,000 to fund the two installations. Oonee plans to ask riders to help decide the location for these initial curbside pods, each about 7 feet long and able to hold as many as seven bikes. The company’s aim is to build a dispersed network of hundreds of pods across the city, with the larger walk-in versions set in high-traffic areas and the smaller lockboxes dotting residential blocks.

“In New York we have more than 3 million free curbside parking spaces,” Stuart says. “Do we want to provide people with access to bike and scooter parking? Or do we want to preserve the space for cars only?”

In the long term, Oonee aims to bring its pods to other cities and, once they attract enough users, to offer a larger set of services through the company’s app. If riders, for instance, pop a tire on the way to work, Stuart wants them to be able to use the app to arrange for a mechanic to come to the pod and fix the flat the same day. He also plans for users to be able to buy bikes and scooters, as well as accessories and insurance, through the app.

Oonee would contract with third-party providers for these services and take commissions of about 15% on the transactions, making the company, Stuart says, into a “one-stop shop, right on your phone, for everything related to bike or scooter ownership.” Whereas many European cities, including London and Paris, are building out comprehensive bike-parking networks through government spending, Oonee is attempting to build one through an e-commerce business model.

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