Today I did something new: I took a Bay Wheels e-bike from my home to the 22nd street CalTrain station. I did a very quick test with Bay Wheels last night, but this was my first actual ride.

Finding and unlocking a bike is quite easy. The app consistently invokes Google Pay multiple times, which doesn’t instill confidence. It ended up charging me only once though, but it leaves an annoying number of notifications and is again… not great for travel-anxious puf.

The ride itself is suite simple:

Most of this route has separated bike lanes, with the rest having clear bike markings. This is pretty much as good as it gets! And the e-bike makes re-accelerating from the frequent stop signs/lights a breeze too.

As a born-and-raised Dutchie, I’m used to bicycling through city traffic - but you can easily see that many drivers, cyclists, and autonomous cars are still getting used to sharing the road.

I was anxious whether there’d be a place to park the bike at the official Bay Wheels stop at 22nd street station, but that was all good. After placing the bike back into the self-locking pod, the ride came down to:

$10.19 is rather expensive for a ride of less than 20 minutes. Yes, I did notice the “members pay…” section, but I’m not ready for that level of commitment yet. :-)

So while I like the experience of riding the Bay Wheels e-bike, I might still walk back home later today. That also gives me a chance to make more progress on the laugh-out-loud audio-book I’m “reading”.