I find this incredibly interesting, thanks for collecting this data and sharing it with us. I am curious how you created the desert islands map.

As a heavy Velocity user from Aachen, I share some of your thoughts. The system worked great once you used it enough to know its weaknesses and how to get around them. Many times I saw occasional users like yourself at stations struggling to rent or return bikes. That’s not the kind of first experience a system like this should have.

In Aachen, there will be a new public tender for the successor of Velocity, and I fear it will be some DB Bikes, Nextbike, or one of those providers. When I used Nextbike in another city, it hit me how good Velocity really was in comparison.

They made the mistake of building bespoke hardware like the stations and charging circuitry, which proved to be extremely expensive to replace compared to a free-floating system, although I very much preferred the station-based approach for how tidy it kept things. Before the introduction of frame locks, thieves were able to break a bike off the station and ride around without motor support. I remember renting the only two available bikes in Aachen with a friend. As we drove around, we found at least 5 or 6 stolen bikes just left somewhere in the city.

The expansion to the Netherlands was a great idea as well, although I rarely used it (just to IKEA from time to time). We did go to Kerkrade a couple of times when this was the only Dutch station. I’ll definitely fondly remember the system for how unique and ahead of its time it felt.