The rental bike and me
The pure home office times are over, me and my husband now have to have fixed days of presence. So I have to come up with strategies for getting to the office when I can’t use our car. The train connection is unnecessarily inconvenient because I first drive a little north, then change trains to the west and then drive south again (or walk the last part). It would be practical to get off at an earlier stop and then cycle for about a quarter of an hour along a straight route with a cycle path. But I don’t have that much nerve to take a bulky Dutch bike onto the tram during rush hour.
I’ve been thinking about getting the Germany ticket, which now costs 49 euros, for a while now that I’m spending a lot more time in the neighboring town where I also work. I walk past a poster where the local transport association advertises that the associated rental bikes can be used for 30 minutes. Even if this were for a whole day, as I mistakenly assume at first (it applies per journey started), that would be enough for my purposes.
So I book the Germany ticket using the transport association app and install the Nextbike app, which you can then use to rent the bikes. Or, could, because that doesn’t work with my ticket. This is only possible with a physical ticket in the form of a card, which I have to order from the transport association a month in advance.
So, with gritted teeth, I canceled my Deutschlandticket subscription and traveled by train with my ticket in the app for a month until my new transport association card arrived in the mail. With the number stamped there, I can finally register with Nextbike. After a symbolic payment of one euro via Paypal, I can now use any of the provider’s bikes free of charge for 30 minutes per trip.
In the app, free bikes are now shown to me within a limited radius via GPS. I can reserve it for 15 minutes, find it using the navigation function and open the lock by scanning the QR code on the bike and start riding. Closing the lock again ends the journey.
I find that my commute is ideal for this type of transportation. Just a few minutes’ walk from the stop where I get off, in the direction of the way to my job, is the university, where there are always a lot of these bikes around and there is also an official bike station from the provider. I get along well with rental bikes. They only have three gears and at first I almost fall off because there is no coaster brake, but we quickly get used to each other. And so I become a regular user of bike sharing.
The following things stand out to me.
– Using the app to rent and track the bike path takes a lot of battery out of my already very old Pixel 4. So I’m getting into the habit of carrying a power bank with me.
– The reservation function is very unreliable. Sometimes the bike is already gone when I arrive at the supposed location, and once it is borrowed from right under my nose. Sometimes a bike is shown as available in the app, but is already reserved when you arrive.
– There are older and newer models of bicycles that differ primarily in how the saddle lock is mounted and how easy or difficult it is to open and close.
– Unfortunately, you cannot tell whether a bike is defective before you rent it. You can report the damage in the app.
– The average bike sharing user sets the saddle at height 2, but I need height 1 and often have to shake the saddle very inelegantly before it moves down.
– The rental bikes from the transport association are quite rare goods. Unless I’m doing short errands with it and using the ride pause function, a bike I’ve previously parked will almost certainly be gone after an hour or two. On the other hand, I see bikes from Deutsche Bahn or other providers more often. I assume that it is because students, like me, use the free 30 minutes with their semester ticket.
I’ve now gotten so used to using rental bikes that I also use less complicated train routes for other journeys into the city or park my car within bike reach instead of in the notoriously overcrowded city center. Unfortunately, as I said, the competition for these bikes is relatively high. I’m hoping for an upgrade, because I don’t really want to book an extra tariff with another provider like DB.
(Angela Heider-Willms)