Sharing is caring: How we got a small bike sharing fleet.

If bike sharing providers are due to questionable business conduct go broke or the city becomes too small for several providers, mostly gruesome and beautiful pictures of Bicycle cemeteries.

In order to avoid this, the provider “Byke” from Frankfurt am Main turned to us and asked whether we were interested in 350 bicycles. Wait what? The sheer volume made us swallow at first. Can we get that organized? Where should we get storage space for it? And how do the bikes get to Berlin? But because we have a long waiting list of people who have signed up for a bike with us, we decided to give it a try. Fortunately, we were not left alone with this challenge. Through cooperation with the Initiative "We tackle it" and another great bike project, the Lichtenberger Garage 10, we were actually able to handle the transport and split the costs among ourselves.

Of the 350 bikes that were brought from Frankfurt to Berlin on two truck tours with a 40-ton truck, we ultimately received 150. These are stored at a school in Charlottenburg and a Neukölln school, which in return each keep 20 bikes as schoolyard bikes can. We serviced the bikes again on two days of action and will probably start giving them to the people on our registration list at the end of July.

By then, some of the bikes have already got to know Berlin and the surrounding area: through a cooperation with the teach first gGmbH we could attach the bikes to that “Hannah Höch” - community school in Pankow to lend. This made excursions possible with the bikes, during which the students could get to know their district from a completely new perspective.

We are looking forward to further success stories that can be written with the redistribution of our small “Byke fleet” and we would like to take this opportunity to once again express our thanks to all participating organizations and volunteers.