Musings and Reveries #2: The bikes in our park

Thailand has beautiful parks. One of our favorite parks is Suan Luang in Phuket Town, which has an official name of King Rama IX Park. The park is always packed with people exercising, biking, or just relaxing. Despite this, I never found it too crowded or unpleasant. I find that Thai people are always respectful of others, so you never get bothered with noise or ruckus. To simply put it, everyone is peacefully doing their own thing.

The park has a land area of 140 acres (350 rai) that is sectioned into different lagoons, fountains, landscape gardens, children’s playground, different sport courts, and a fitness area. The latest installment is a 4 kilometers bike/jogging lane than takes you around the park’s perimeter.

When you have inherent laziness in your blood, you never run out of excuses not to go to the park and exercise. Yes, that is exactly how I would describe myself and my fiancé. This changed last year when Bike Sharing was introduced in Phuket. At the moment, there are 2 companies that offer this to our city. We have OFO and O-Bike. You wanna know the best part? You can use the bike for FREE. Yes! Free! Awesome, right? Not sure how long this freebie will last for though. At the moment, we are taking advantage and keeping ourselves healthy in the process.

I'm sure bike sharing is old news in many countries. But, please indulge me, it is a new thing in Phuket and I'm one of those thrilled about it.

Okay, so let me tell you how it works. Firstly, you need to download the app. Search for a bike (pretty simple because the park if flooded with bikes in almost every corner).

Then, just scan the QR codes found on the bike and you are ready to go. Really easy and as I said, totally FREE!

A bicycle-sharing system, public bicycle system, or bike-share scheme, is a service in which bicycles are made available for shared use to individuals on a very short term basis for a price. Bike share schemes allow people to borrow a bike from point A and return it at point B. Many bike-share systems offer subscriptions that make the first 30–45 minutes of use either free or very inexpensive, encouraging use as transportation. This allows each bike to serve several users per day. In most bike-share cities, casual riding over several hours or days is better served by bicycle rental than by bike-share. For many systems, smartphone mapping apps show nearby stations with available bikes and open docks. source