The episode in detail
The company bike: when employers get their staff in the saddle
Arthur de Jerphanion left the food industry and a job with a company car to co-found Tandem in January 2020. The trigger: years of Parisian traffic jams and the realisation that his short car trips made no sense. With his co-founder Nicolas Delcourt, he built a long-term rental service for company bikes, now used by 180 companies with 4,000 bikes in circulation across France.
How the company bike works
The principle is simple: the company leases bikes over 24, 36 or 48 months. The rental cost is split between the employer, often 70%, and the employee, 30%, deducted directly from the payslip, in the same way as health insurance or meal vouchers. Each employee chooses from a catalogue: urban bike, hybrid, longtail. The bike is delivered to the office, insured against damage, theft and liability, and maintained by a network of partner bike shops across France.
“It’s very different from the company car because it’s not a status symbol, it’s not reserved for managers. It’s really offered to every employee, from the lowest paid to the chief executive.”
At the end of the contract, there are three options: extend for a year, buy the bike for around 15% of its retail price, or return it to be put back into circulation second-hand through a specialist partner.
The strikes and Covid: two accelerators in France
Arthur identifies two turning points for cycle commuting in France. First, the strikes at the end of 2019, which paralysed public transport and forced thousands of people to get their bikes back out. Then Covid, which boosted the visibility of cycling and sped up the development of cycling infrastructure, achieving in two or three years what would normally take a decade. But lockdown also slowed Tandem down: with 90% of teams working from home, companies pushed back mobility projects by 6 to 12 months.
“Before Covid, cycling in France was fairly binary: either you cycle in lycra to climb Mont Ventoux, or you cycle as a child. There was very little daily cycle commuting.”
Today, remote work is no longer a barrier. Fully remote work has almost disappeared, most companies now run a hybrid model. And Tandem is clear: the company bike is also used for personal trips, errands, picking up children from school, or weekend leisure rides.
Medium-sized cities adopt faster than Paris
Counter-intuitively, Tandem records better conversion rates in medium-sized cities, such as Angers and Aix-en-Provence, than in the big metropolises. The explanation: in Paris, Lyon or Bordeaux, there are many alternatives to the car. In medium-sized cities, the choice often comes down to car or bike. As a result, 80% of Tandem’s fleet is deployed outside the major cities.
“We were pleasantly surprised. When we go into a city like Angers, plenty of people live less than 10 km from their workplace. And when you offer them a bike, they use it two, three, four, sometimes five times a week.”
The modal share of cycling in France stands at around 4 to 5% nationally, against 12 to 15% in Germany or Belgium, and 20 to 25% in Denmark.
The number one barrier: resistance to change
No one says the idea is bad. The real obstacle is organisational inertia. Reimbursement of public transport is institutionalised, the car fleet has a clear owner. The company bike falls between departments: HR, CSR, finance, procurement.
The Tandem method: survey employees, build a forecast budget, launch a pilot with around fifty volunteers. Among those who express interest, one in two actually takes it up in the first wave. But the snowball effect does the rest: 92% of client companies have gone on to order more bikes.
“Employees talking to their colleagues are far more powerful and effective than we are at defending the practice and selling it to their peers.”
The gains are concrete: a MEDEF study shows that employees who cycle to work are 6 to 9% more productive. Less stress, faster journeys in urban areas, savings on parking spaces. Tandem reports 90% satisfaction and a rating of 4.9 out of 5.
A cultural and industrial issue
Arthur points to a structural barrier: the weight of the French car industry. His conviction: replacing 100% of petrol and diesel cars with electric ones will not be enough. What is needed is simply fewer cars. He cites Finland, 6 million inhabitants, 100,000 company bikes deployed, to show that climate is not an excuse.
Making cycling appealing at every age
Most adult cyclists stopped riding as teenagers. Arthur sees this as a marketing problem. Bike brands talk too much like specialists and not enough about the pleasure of riding.
“Why does an 18-year-old find it cool to ride a scooter and old-fashioned to ride a bike? We need to change that in people’s minds.”
Tandem is continuing to grow in France, its fleet multiplied by five between 2022 and 2024, with the ambition of supporting SMEs of 50 employees as well as large corporations.
