A waste of money, a standard bike with standard bicycle parts is cheaper and easier to maintain, plus with a cheaper bike, they should be able to buy extra bikes as spares, so very little downtime as you can swap the bikes while the faulty ones get fixed.
Getting a brompton with small wheels? *facepalm and shakeheads...... I think it is better to get a hybrid or a mountain bike as they can ride off-road with those, plus some foldable mountain bikes cost cheaper.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking cheap is bad. It depends on what and where you buy them. Those from Giant and Carrefour? Probably not. But bikes from the likes of Rodalink and even those Monotines are quite ok. Plus some even have disc brakes.
It is one of those stupid decisions and stupid thought processes that tend to be endemic in stat/gov boards for which I have had the unfortunate luxury to have sat through a few times.
I would have gone for cheaper bikes and a dynamo that can charge their smartphone/tablet or gps whatever. They can make use of this devices on their rounds/make reports, alert or notify back to their operations centre of any repairs/corrections that they need to do, all paperless, quick and efficient as well.
But noooo..... 2.2k on bromptons...
I make this statement above as someone who is in IT, cycles to work and use the connector parks often.
Actually thats not true, cheaper bikes break down more easily and end up with more maintenance cost. buying extra bikes as spare is not a good alternative as you'll need to provide parking space for these extra bikes. Cheap Bikes that are not ridden, rust pretty quickly if not kept indoors.
It's like a photographer spending thousands on a good camera which is weather proof. you don't tell a wedding photographer to buy a cheap camera and buy a few more as spare rather then get a good pro-camera right?
Have you ridden a bromptons before? your cheap bikes will have problem keeping up..