In Germany Car Parking Slots are for Cars only

I was amused yesterday to read in the Südhessen Morgen, our local daily paper, that the body representing owners of rented properties in Germany had issued a statement stating that if one rents a property with a designated marked car slot, this slot should only be used to park a motor car that is roadworthy and licenced. I take it that the slots mentioned are in covered parking areas which are often found adjacent to apartment blocks. It should not be used to store bicycles or drink crates. This would  break the terms of the rental contract. Quite what one does if does not own a motor vehicle, but does own the (n+1) ideal number of bicycles has not been explained. Presumably one fills the bicycle room in the cellar. 

One cannot also use a car parking slot in a  city centre to house one or more bicycles even if one feeds the parking meter. These slots too are for cars alone. You may however stand your bike parallel to the direction of traffic on the road adjacent to the pavement in a manner similar to motor cars, as long as it is not verboten under the road traffic regulations. I doubt however whether this is to be recommended as car parking and space on the road is a major source of irritation in Germany. You are likely at best on your return to find your steed has been picked up and thrown in a hedge or down an alleyway.

Back to Karl Drais and how would he crack the problem of motorised traffic clogging city streets?

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We both have an annual regional season ticket from our regional transport authority. There is a bus stop around the corner that during the week offers a service every quarter of an hour until 20:00 to the light rail service into Heidelberg, Mannheim and Weinheim. The bus service is half hourly at weekends. It's not perfect. The buses follow a circuitous route and the connection time to the light rail service is often a minute which can mean waiting ten, twenty or thirty minutes for the next tram if the bus is delayed in traffic. There is also an hourly free pre-bookable taxi service in the evening when the buses stop running, but the light railway offers a half hourly service. This means we might need to wait in Mannheim for an extra half hour. What this means is that if we are going to Mannheim on a Sunday or will be returning after 20:00, we take the car to the local shopping centre/mall ten minutes away by and park it there. The centre features a cinema and so there is no move to offer time limited parking on the British pattern. The snag is that if we just drive the car for ten minutes, its fuel consumption is higher than when it is warm and its exhaust gases are dirtier. 

What we could do is cycle to the shopping centre. We often do when we are shopping. There are bike racks available. There is a snag though. If a bike is left at the tram stop for a few hours there is a chance that some misguided individual will try to steal it or just jump on it to reduce to a pile of scrap. One idea that would improve matters would be lockable bike storage boxes. They need not be free. Put a few of these near every park and ride facility and more of us would cycle to the railway lines. This is not utopian or even rocket science. Some of the S-Bahn (suburban railway stations) in Rhineland Palatinate have banks of these boxes.

Edinburgh Waverley Station Bike Facilities - Watch out Copenhagen

We are both British but have lived abroad for 30 and 40 years. We have not travelled with a bicycle on a British train since privatisation. From what we read the railways in Britain do not appear to be very cyclist friendly. We read stories of British long-distance trains that take a maximum of two bicycles, so if a family of four want to take their bicycles on holiday, they need to travel on two separate trains. However we were pleasantly surprised recently on Edinburgh's Waverley Station. We wanted to take the recently reopened Borders Railway to Tweedbank. As we waited for the train I noticed a pillar on the platform. On closer inspection I noticed a number of tools, a bicycle pump and a rack to hang a bike from to ease working on it. Network Rail, the public organisation responsible for stations and track paid for this. This platform seems to offer better facililties than any Danish, Dutch or Swiss railway station we have visited.

However the warning that one should lock both front and back wheels does not bode well for bike security.

Ways of encouraging cycling to work

We are thinking of building a bicycle box for the front of the house and came across the Velo-Boxx which is manufactured in Belgium. It would appear that Belgian tax laws are very cyclist friendly:

Pursuant to article 64 (b) of the Belgian Income Tax Code (WIB of 1992; assessment year 2010), the Velo-Boxx is a 120% deductible expenditure;
ｰ all costs incurred or borne that relate specifically to encouraging employees to cycle to and from work to the extent that any such costs have been incurred or borne in order to:
- Acquire real estate, to build or renovate a facility for parking cycles during the
working hours of the employees; or
- Provide sanitary conveniences or changing rooms, with showers as appropriate.

An excellent idea.

Bicycle Hire in Bonn, Germany

The Radstation in Bonn near the main railway station is operated by Caritas, a Roman Catholic social mission. It employs and trains people, young and old who have difficulty finding employment to become bicycle mechanics. One can hire refurbished bikes there. One day's hire costs €10. The price drops to €7 a day for longer hire periods. It is possible to return the bikes to other Radstation in North Rhine Westphalia, but this costs extra.
The Radstation is near the Bonn Hauptbahnhof (Main railway station) on Quantiusstraße, opposite numbers 6-8 in a blue container, 53115 Bonn, Tel (0228) 9814636. It also offers secure bike parking and repair.
Website: www.radstationbonn.de

Cycling in Europe Guide updated

We have rewritten the "Cycling in Europe" collection of helpful hints and suggestions for touring cyclists. It is available from Amazon (search "Cycling" "Forsyth" in the Kindle Shop) and from Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/245564) now. There is a lot more information about where to cycle in Europe: The latest information on the instant fines levied by German policemen; downloading GPS tracks; a photograph of the best guarded bike rack in the world; putting bikes on trains and busses in Europe and how to save money by not buying mineral water.

An idea for cycle clubs

The ADFC section in Ottersweier, a village south of Karlsruhe in the Rhine Valley, organises free bike parking for the annual Dorfbachfest, a typical jolly German weekend fest with grilled sausages, beer and umpah bands. The village council supplies a car park and galvanised wire builders' fencing. The ADFC supplies volunteers to guard the bike park, organises a ticketing system and has an information stand. The chairman of the ADFC group and the organiser of this action wrote that cyclists are overjoyed to find secure parking and it is a good way to acquire new members.
I realise that do's with umpah bands and beer are few and far between in Britain, but there will be large numbers of cyclists to watch le Tour next year in Yorkshire and there will be more mass cycling events in London, so CTC local groups could help themselves and the cycling community by laying on bike parking at various events.
5 January 2014: I suppose it could even be seen as one of the ideas supported by David Cameron in the Big Society project.

Würzburg bike parking

Würzburg lies on the River Main in Germany and is also the start of the Romantic Road to Füssen. It has has much to offer, the Residenz - the bishop's palace said by Napoleon to be the finest vicarage in Europe, the Marienberg Fortress, the cathedral, the churches in the old town amongst other items and the beer is not bad either. If you want to play the tourist for a couple of hours but are worried about leaving your bike, but don't want to push it around the city, then the city's tourist office offers a solution that we have not found anywhere else. The tourist office has set a up a guarded bike park in conjunction with the city's parks department, the city council and the employment office. It costs one Euro a day and  if you buy a meal, a snack or something by the Bike & Park Payback Partners for more than 5 Euros, even this will be returned to you. It is still advisable to take your core valuables, passport, camera and the 20 000 Euros in cash your auntie gave you to pay into a numbered account with you, but your panniers with their dirty washing can be left behind.

By bike to the Floriade

The Netherlands is famous for its flower production and every ten years the country organises a world horticultural exhibition. This year it has been held in Venlo just over the border from the German province of North Rhine Westphalia. (If you fancy a quick trip to the Netherlands it still on until October 7. ) Judith is a keen gardener and so it was obvious that we'd should go. We went last week and decided to stop in Straelen just over the border in North Rhine Westphalia. We are rewriting our Rhine 2 guide and so it seemed a good idea to combine a trip to look at new types of garden forks, bird houses and rubber boots with an investigation of the cycle routes in the Lower Rhine region.

We had the bikes with us in Straelen and discovered that the town had laid out a cycle route to connect with a Dutch cycle route to the exhibition. Taking public transport to the exhibition and return using a collective taxi to the station in Venlo and the bus to the Floriade would have cost us €14 a piece, so taking the bikes was quite attractive. We followed temporary signposting into the Netherlands. Finding the the exhibition once we crossed the border was easy we just followed the signs painted on quiet country roads.

There was adequate free bike parking available:

Our guesstimate was about a thousand bikes:

The exhibition was excellent and we enjoyed our 32 km trip there and back.

Red face avoided

Bauhaus is a major German chain of DIY shops. There is a branch on the Rhein Neckar Zentrum our local shopping centre. The shop has a fair to middling garden section and we decided to go today to pick up some grass seed to convert the moss patch in the garden (yard) into a lawn or, at least, that's the plan. It is much quicker to cycle there and so we took the Bromptons. When we arrived we could not see the minimal bike rack that has been there for years. The shop is forever having stands outside the entrance selling plants, so we decided that our bike rack had been sacrificed to mammon. We fastened the two bikes together and marched into the shop to the Information Stand. I had already started to work out a plan of action involving the local branches of the ADFC to shame shop managements in to giving us adequate bike stands. I explained to the young woman on the Info Stand that the replacement value of our bikes was about €2000 and I was not happy leaving them outside where they could be popped into a motor car as easy as winking. Could she tell management please? I was about to launch into my description of the forthcoming campaign, when she then told us that metal thieves had stolen the former bike rack, but steps had been taken to order a new rack cemented into the floor.

Cycling in Munich

We spent ten days shepherding or at least helping to shepherd seventeen North American cyclists along the Romantic Road and returned home via Munich. There is normally a good rail link between Füssen, the end of the Romantic Road and Munich, but it seems to our fate that part of the route is under reconstruction. It was true this time and was true the last time. There was a bus connection between Füssen and Obermarktdorf.
The cyclist arrives in Munich and wants to see the sights of Munich without his bike. Munich is a typical big city and leaving a valuable bike anywhere is not a good idea. The Hauptbahnhof, central station offers no facilities for bicycle parking. This is madness of course, but since when has a shortly to be privatised industry worked in a sensible manner? You can take it with you, but the Deutsches Museum, the Hofbräuhaus or even the much more ethnic Augustiner Beer Hall don't like you taking a bike in their hallowed rooms.
One cure might be to nip into the Radius Tours Bike Rental enclosure opposite Platform/Track 32 and hire a bike. You can then leave your expensive light tourer there and take off on a three gear bike, which is a lot less attractive to the light fingered. Radius Tours offer a wide range of tours in Munich and Southern Bavaria in addition to hiring out bikes.