Call a Bike

Call a Bike is a dockless bike hire system run by Deutsche Bahn (DB) in several German cities. Developed in 1998 and in operation since 2000, Call a Bike uses a system of authentication codes to automatically lock and unlock bikes.

Coverage

Hamburg

Berlin

Kassel

Cologne

Frankfurt

Stuttgart

Munich

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Cities in Germany providing city-wide coverage of Call a Bike

Availability may be differentiated between cities providing full area coverage, and those only offering bikes at the respective Hauptbahnhof. Full citywide coverage is provided in some of the larger cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart.^{[notes 1]} The city of Karlsruhe used to have a citywide system from 2007 until 2013.

Most cities with Intercity-Express (ICE) rail service have at least one Call a Bike location at the station. Those cities include: Aachen, Aschaffenburg, Augsburg, Baden-Baden, Bamberg, Bremen, Bonn, Bielefeld, Braunschweig, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Erlangen, Freiburg im Breisgau, Flensburg, Fulda, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Gütersloh, Gotha, Göttingen, Hamm, Halle (Saale), Hanau, Hannover, Heidelberg, Hildesheim, Ingolstadt, Kaiserslautern, Lübeck, Magdeburg, Mainz, Mannheim, Minden, Oberhausen, Oldenburg, Rostock, Saarbrücken, Warnemünde, Weimar, Wolfsburg and Würzburg.

Since early 2014, the stations in the cities of Darmstadt and Wiesbaden are managed by respective municipal or university organizations.

Technology

The system uses an electronic wheel lock and a cable lock, all controlled by embedded microcontroller with touchscreen LC display. A set of 1024 pregenerated lock/unlock codes are unique to each bike and stored in memory.^[1]

Usage

To find the bikes one has to search at the cross roads in the central areas of the towns or use location-based services^[2] on modern cell phones to find them.

To hire: Customer calls the telephone number given on the bike which includes the bike's ID and gets by voice the 4 digit opening code, which the customer then types onto the bike's touch screen to unlock it. They can also use the official Call a Bike app, available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, to locate a bike and receive the opening code.^[3]

Notes

^ In Berlin and Hamburg Call a Bike is also/mostly known as "StadtRAD", in Kassel also known as "Konrad".

References

^ Hack a Bike – keep on hacking in a free world!
^ Qiro will unentbehrlicher mobiler Helfer sein – Golem.de
^ Noch mobiler mit der Call a Bike-App!

External links

Official website, in German
CCC article on the technical details of the system
Rental process (Video)

[1] In Berlin and Hamburg Call a Bike is also/mostly known as "StadtRAD", in Kassel also known as "Konrad".

[2] Hack a Bike – keep on hacking in a free world!

[3] Qiro will unentbehrlicher mobiler Helfer sein – Golem.de

[4] Noch mobiler mit der Call a Bike-App!