City bicycles

After my recent trip to Amsterdam I’ve been thinking more about how using a bicycle to get around a city whether as a tourist or local is a great idea. But in keeping with our budget travelling tips, I’ve been looking into how you can get on your bike for the cheapest possible way in cities worldwide. A lot of city’s offer private bicycle rental from shops where you can rent a bike for a few hours for a certain price.

However, I think the best and cheapest way to get biking around a city is to get on one of the public bicycle sharing schemes or city bikes that many cities around the world are now running.

Most of these bike sharing/ city bikes schemes work on the same principals; give or take a few exceptions. Some of these include paying a small, cash deposit in order to release the bicycle from its terminal which will be refunded upon its return. Some schemes also require you to become a member of the city bicycles scheme and you will then get a membership card to release the bicycle from its hub. This kind of program is often the most budget friendly as it offers the first half hour of use for free.

Our advice? Whatever city you are travelling to next, take a look to see if they offer a city bikes service like these as you will not only have a great time exploring the city, you will save a lot on public transport and also give those legs a little work out in the process!

Some cities already successfully running this type of city bicycle service include –

Sevici, Seville, Spain
Dublin Bikes, Dublin, Ireland
Villo!, Brussels, Belgium
OYBike, Cardiff, Wales, also in Farnborough and Reading in England.
SmartBike DC, Washington DC, USA
YouBike, Taipei City, Taiwan

The above are just a handful of the many cities, towns and universities that now offer this city bikes sharing service. So make sure you look into these if you want to bike around a city on your next vacation!