ECOBICI

This is sort of a funny review. The app was a little bit buggy, and sometimes it was very hard to get the app to approve the bicycle checkout. So long as I double checked that the bike was docked correctly I had no problem stopping my time. I ran into two problems with ecobici. First sometimes the bikes just didn’t work. A couple of times I had bikes back just spun out because the gearing was broken, and my partner had bikes with loose brakes and seats that would not stay up. Second, and this is no real knock on Ecobici, Mexico City is a nightmare to get around on a bike. Unless you know the city extremely well or have flawlessly working maps expect to get lost a lot. And very frustrated. A bunch of times I had an estimate on Google Maps of a ride of less than 30 minutes and it ended up taking me 46 minutes, which meant that I got charged a bit more on ecobici. The charge was low enough, but navigating traffic and unclear directions made something that is always fun for me – riding a bike – and incredibly stressful experience. I’m exceptionally comfortable riding in traffic, but getting lost was just unbearable. I wouldn’t use bikes again in CDMX.

After a few days in CDMX, we tired of the nonstop traffic congestion and downloaded this app. We rode Ecobici for 2 days totally liberated! The app was great, albeit a bit slow sometimes, but gave us all the information we needed including available bikes, available spots for return, location of the bike lots on a map, etc. The service was overall great - the bikes, aside from the brakes, worked well and the lot locations were conveniently and generously located. Overall, it was a great service! Integration with Google maps would be icing on the cake.

It works like 95 percent of the time. When it doesn’t, it’s a huge pain. Hard to rely on this as an alternative transportation system to cars/transit when it can cost you time/money if you’re trying to get somewhere on time and docks won’t unlock bikes or tell you you’re over the limit of uses (??) when you have an annual membership.