No more queuing at the tourist information
At the “Days of German-Language Literature” in Klagenfurt you need a means of transport, because the bathing lake is close, but not close enough to walk there and back. So far, that meant that you had to reserve a rental bike in good time – I don’t know how that was done, because of course I failed when I said “on time”. Then you went to the tourist information as soon as possible after arrival and asked for a rental bike.
If you didn’t have a reservation, they looked at you as if you were hopeless. If you had reserved (which I could observe with more organized people), the answer was often “Where did you reserve that? Not with us!” or that for some reason there is still no bicycle. You had to fill in things, it was a long process, but in the end everyone got a bike. Even I. The complications of borrowing and returning (not without the borrowing receipt! and not on the day of departure!) then offered topics of conversation for the duration of the event.
This year I see electric scooters from three different providers on the walk from the train station to the accommodation and I therefore hope that this time I will be able to do without a bike.
I first have to try out whether I still have one of the apps responsible for this and whether it is also ready to work unchanged in Austria. I have, namely the Lime one. That’s good, because most of the scooters from this company are also around. Tier, a third, more yellow type of scooter and rental bikes from nextbike (fixed stations) are also available, but I can’t find out anything about them.
In the following days I drive all other routes (usually 3-4 kilometers) with a Lime scooter. Each of these trips is so expensive (6-10 euros) that I could probably have taken a taxi. But I’m extremely reluctant to take a taxi, and as some of the days I don’t need a vehicle at all, it’s no more expensive overall than the complicated rental bike would have been.
I would have preferred a bike that was easy to borrow and not tied to a station. You just stand around on the scooter without moving, and I don’t feel like a serious road user on it either. But I can see that such a scooter has fewer broken parts than a bicycle and takes up less space when parked, so it’s probably more attractive to the rental company and the city government.
(Kathrin Passig)