Deutsche Bahn bikes

http://www.young-germany.de/call_a_bike.html

Deutsche Bahn bikes offer a quick and easy way around town.

It's late - or is it early? Well, I am stuck at any rate. No bus, no tram,
no cash, no taxi. It's too far to walk - and anyway, I hate walking. But I
am in luck. There it is propped up against the lamppost. My red and white
ticket home - a Call-a-Bike.

The Call-a-Bikes are rental bikes. But not like regular rental bikes. They
are spread throughout the city and locked up at random places for a start.
They are provided and maintained by Germany's railway operator Deutsche Bahn
(DB) in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich. My random place is this
lamppost in front of me. And as I am already registered with Call-a-Bike, I
punch in the number on the bike into my cell phone and wait for the
automated voice to give me the code that will unlock the bike.

The clock starts ticking away. The cost structure, unfortunately, is
Darwinist - favoring the fittest - as prices are calculated not in distance
traveled but per minute. For every minute, you are charged 7 cents or 5
cents if you own a German rail discount train travel card (Bahncard). Eager
to make up time, I speedily peddle through the streets.

In fact not everyone thought that 7 or even 5 cents was such a good deal.
(Maybe they weren't fit?): Last year a group of hackers set about
manipulating the software to permit free use of the bikes. The hackers
claimed to have altered around 10 percent of the bikes in Berlin. But
Deutsche Bahn updated the software on the bikes and put an end to the
hackers' harm - at least for now.

The bikes are surprisingly comfortable as they are equipped with shock
absorbers and comfy saddles. The breaks work a treat (so no lawsuits there)
and you can even tackle hills with eight gears to click through. What's
especially pleasing is that the gears actually work.

Then, before I know it, I am free-wheeling down my street. The trip's taken
me 25 minutes. An automated voice tells me that that's ?1.75 when I call to
get the locking code. It's thus a low-budget alternative to Germany's costly
taxis.

October 2005


--
www.ozcableguy.com
www.oztechnologies.com

the same kind of people who will spend 6 hours making a half hour task
do-able in 10!


--
flyingdutch

flyingdutch wrote:
the same kind of people who will spend 6 hours making a half hour task
do-able in 10!

Did that at my old place of work, except it was a one our task which I
pruned to 5 minutes. Shared my little script with the rest of my
colleagues and over 3 years saved 88 hours. Take off the eight hours it
took me to figure it out and that's eighty hours I saved the company.

What did we do with it? Why watched more TV of course! The wonders of
night shift.
--
Cheers
Euan

On 2006-06-25, flyingdutch (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
the same kind of people who will spend 6 hours making a half hour task
do-able in 10!

Where's my workday gone?

--
TimC
Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning. --unknown
Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying to figure
out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes. --Rev. James Cort, ASR