Renting a Bicycle in Tel Aviv
Yesterday I spent some time at the Tel Aviv Port, a formerly run-down area that has been turned into a super-trendy nice-restauarant upscale-shopping area of the city. While having lunch at a restaurant facing the water, I did something I occasionally do when I'm in new place, I glanced at the 'Near Me' tab in the App Store on my phone. As is common, many of the apps that showed up were transportation related. This included an app called TeloBike (iTunes link), which provided information on the locations of bike rental stations in Tel Aviv, including how many bikes were available at each station. It worked pretty well, and operated in both Hebrew and English. The data for this app presumably comes from the site run by the city of Tel Aviv for bike rentals, Tel-O-Fun. The site itself is not bad, provides a map of all the locations with the number of bikes available, and operates in Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, and Russian. The app Telobike itself is not from the city, or connected to the site directly, but was created by an independent developer. Why doesn't the city have a mobile app itself? I'm not sure. More on that in a second.…