A scooter is the best way to explore an unknown city. It allows you to roam around and explore some new places without too much planning upfront. In order for this to work, it needs to be clear if a service is available and it turns out that this is not always that obvious.
When exploring the island of Corsica I didn’t expect shared mobility to be a big thing. The cities are smaller, there is less suitable space to drive or park, it's less populated and there are more hills… If there was any spot I would have expected a shared mobility service it would have been Ajaccio. It’s the biggest city, it’s the capital, it’s a city with a university, and it has a ferry port and a cruise terminal (tourists)…. But no, no mopeds or scooters to be found.
I would have enjoyed to test out some mobility options on the island, but when exploring a couple of providers, they didn’t show any availability on their websites. An interesting find is that the French version of the Bird website shows different locations than the English one. It that a bug or a deliberate choice…
We had one more city to explore on the island; Bastia. Also a city with a university and a port, but a little smaller in size. I didn’t expect any mobility services since I checked the websites, but in the old town, right outside the citadel, I spotted a couple of Bird scooters! I’m becoming pretty trained when it comes to recognising scooter sharing services and I was very happy to test out the Bird on Corsica.
I was a returning customer, so onboarding and renting was familiar. The thing that was weird, was that the scooters were free-roaming available, but returning them was restricted to parking spots. I saw lot’s of scooters lingering around the boulevard, waiting to be rented out, but I was not able to return mine at that same spot. The returning process itself was a little sketchy since it did not always accept the spot that you wanted to use, even though it right on top of the map icon, ánd right next to other parked mopeds. When using the 3d recognition tool for finding the right spot, it even directed me inside a building... Maybe the GPS was failing, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.
I must say that riding the moped in this hilly city was quite the challenge. In some instances the hills were so steep that the scooter didn’t make it up the hill and I had to walk. Do they equip the vehicles with bigger batteries? I was wondering if this even a criterium when selecting a city?
It was the first city that I encountered where they pull the mopeds out of the Mediterranean…
