A lot of people know that Taiwan is a popular country for bike touring, and most people who live here are familiar with the YouBike public bicycle system. About a month ago i decided i wanted to try to put both of these things together and see how much traveling i could do using just the YouBike network.
I should explain first how the Taiwan public bike system works. This is not the sort of bike rental service that you find near backpacker hostels in touristy destinations around the world, where you swap your passport for a bicycle. 微笑單車 YouBike (stylized as Übike - 微笑 means "smile") is part of the public transport infrastructure of Taiwan. It's a public/private partnership between local transport authorities and the Taiwanese bicycle company Giant. They're designed to solve the "last mile" problem, helping people get from subway stations or other transit hubs to shopping centers, schools and so on.
For trips under 30 minutes on YouBike, you pay 5NTD, which is around 15 cents US, but even taking them out for several hours is fairly affordable. As well as being used by commuters, they are also popular with young people who take them for weekend rides along coastal or riverside greenways. If you have a 悠游卡 EasyCard public transport card, you simply tap the card on the handlebars to unlock the bike, and off you go. (It's been over a year since i originally set this up, but i think you may first have to download the mobile app - which will bind to your phone number - and register your EasyCard, then from that point on you just tap the card and go - no app or phone required.)
The bikes can only be picked up from and returned to designated docks, which at first glance would make them less useful for travelers hoping to use them as a serious form of transport around the country. Additionally, although the bikes themselves do not appear to have GPS, they are implicitly region locked in the sense that there are two different "versions" - the original one (orange bike) and YouBike 2.0 (white bike). You cannot return one to a dock built for the other because the connections are not compatible. I am not sure whether this is deliberate or not, but many cities and counties have the opposite version from their neighbor, which means you can't always use the same bike to cycle from one county to the next.
That said, there are still a surprising amount of docks outside of the major centers. Almost every train station down the west coast of Taiwan has a YouBike dock. Schools, universities, parks and temples are other good places to find a bike. But if you plan on touring, i recommend downloading an app to find all the docks. There are dozens of apps that claim to show all the docks (including the official YouBike apps), but some of them are dated and broken, only a few work across city/county boundaries and all of them are packed full of ads... I tried them all and the best one i can suggest is called 腳踏車抵家 BikesHere on Android, mainly because for the most part it gets out of your way. You will mostly need it when you get close to a border and need to switch bikes. Or you can just follow your nose, ask local people and hope for the best.
In case anyone is looking for a quick cheat sheet, here is what i found during my trip.
臺北/新北 Taipei and New Taipei City - YouBike 2.0
桃園 Taoyuan - YouBike 1.0
新竹 Hsinchu - YouBike 2.0
苗栗 Miaoli - YouBike 1.0
臺中 Taichung - YouBike 2.0
彰化 Changhua - Moovo (see below)
雲林 Yunlin - ⚠️ no share bikes!
嘉義 Chiayi - YouBike 2.0, but only in the city (see below)
臺南/高雄/屏東 Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung - YouBike 2.0
The way that i traveled was to take the bike to a dock as close to the city or county border as possible, then walk to the nearest dock on the other side. In some places like New Taipei City to Taoyuan, that can literally just mean across the road, but in other places you might need to hike 5 or 10km to the next dock.
The important places to know about are Changhua, Yunlin and Chiayi.
Changhua has made a deal with a Singapore company called Moovo for their public bike system, which uses the kind of bikes i am familiar with from what used to be 摩拜單車 Mobike (now 美團單車 Meituan Bike) in China. They are a GPS-enabled dockless bike made from flimsier stuff than the YouBikes, but it's worst of both worlds because even though the Moovo bikes are dockless, you can only pick them up and return them inside designated places where the GPS allows you to park. You will need to register on a different app and learn a bit of Chinese to use them because the bikes only report their status with a robot voice. The basic operation is to swipe your card (after you registered in the app) and then the wheel lock unlocks. To park the bike you need to move it into a special spot (it's painted on the ground in green), swipe your card again, then manually click closed the wheel lock, and the voice will confirm the price after you locked it.
But the worst part of this Moovo service is not the bike, it's the coverage. I could only find docks in the central parts of Changhua city, and in Yuanlin city - about 15km south of Changhua. Although you can freely ride around the rest of the county, you can't leave the bike anywhere else, so you're stuck doing a circle back to where you started. It was when i got to Changhua that i first took alternative forms of transport. First a single stop on a local train from the southernmost-station in Taichung into Changhua city, and then a bunch more stops out of Yuanlin further south.
Yunlin county (between Changhua and Chiayi) has no bikes at all that i can determine.
Chiayi is also a pain. They have YouBike 2.0, but only inside the main city part of Chiayi. Still - in my infinite wisdom - i saw there were YouBike 2.0 docks in Tainan, so i figured fuck it and rode out of Chiayi city, through the county and parked in Tainan... where i was hit with a massive 700NTD (US$22) fee on top of the usual amount which up until then had always been under 200NTD (US$6) per day. It was then that i figured i better find out what the rules are for taking YouBikes across the designated boundaries.
And here is the page that explains it all: 臺北市|YouBike微笑單車-收費方式 - https://www.youbike.com.tw/region/taipei/rate/ It seems it is fine to ride these bikes across the boundaries, but you could be hit with a fee of 600 to 1000NTD on top of the standard rate. If you are trying to travel on a shoestring, it's probably not worth it in most areas, but then again if you are traveling on a shoestring it would probably be cheaper to just take buses or trains across the country anyway. The whole point of taking a public bike is that it's a different way to travel.
I first got the idea when i was living in China, actually. Before COVID hit, i was thinking of taking share bikes all the way around the Pearl River Delta "long way" from Hong Kong to Macau. I had already done some overnight trips as an experiment. The great thing about using share bikes instead of traditional bike rentals or owning your own bike is the flexibility. If you don't feel like biking any more, you just return the bike, pretty much wherever you are, and go back to walking or busing or training or whatever form of transport takes your fancy. If you get to a cool mountain path where the bike won't go, you just leave the bike behind and go up the mountain. Of course, this is a little less true in Taiwan where the bike share systems are docked, so you can't just leave the bike anywhere, but it's still a hell of a lot more freedom than you have owning a bike, or being forced to return it back to the same city where you started.
You do have to be prepared to get minimal, though, because these bikes do not have racks. Which, depending on your situation, may or may not be easy to do. For me the way i usually travel is to work for a couple years, then quit work, then travel for a year, then go back to work again. But this time i was doing a conventional vacation where i had 2 weeks off from full-time work and a small apartment back in Taipei where i could leave most of my stuff. I tell you what, it is very, very different going traveling when you do not need to bring literally everything you own with you. When you can leave winter clothes behind. When you can live all your paperwork behind. When you can choose to not take a sleep system because you have cash for lodgings.
I got by fine with just my 30L Aquaquest waterproof backpack. I also had a drawstring bag into which i stowed two large water bottles, phone and other day supplies, set up in the front basket of the bicycle. Off the bicycle just bundle the drawstring bag into your backpack and go. The key piece of equipment was two ROK motorcycle straps i had left over from my bike tour across Turtle Island a couple years back. Honestly, i wish i had a couple more of these things. They are so much better than anything else at easily and quickly attaching your bag to a vehicle. Way better than old-fashioned bungees and much better than Voile straps too. The Aquaquest pack has webbing, which also helps a lot to strap it firmly onto shit. This is the kind of thing i will always be looking out for in any future travel products, if or when this stuff eventually falls apart.
The other thing you gotta be prepared for in Taiwan is rain. Depending when and where you travel, you might be able to get away with sneaking a week or two without a drop falling from the sky, but in most places and for most of the year there is always a thunderstorm looming. And big ass serious fucking storms at that. On literally the first day i left Taipei, it was burning hot 37 degrees outside, sunny and humid and extremely brutal going on a heavy, three-gear bicycle. Rain front came overhead and dumped enough to turn the next road i turned down into a river. I had taken shelter in a small hut next to a rice paddie while the lightning was overhead, thought it was safe to leave, until, yeah, ended up knee-deep in that muddy water. I made it out of that one and resolved to be a bit smarter next time. Which is how i ended up on top of a mountain 20km from the nearest town soaked to the bone. Fortunately i found a small temple where a guy brewed me up a pot of tea and shared candy and conversation to lift my spirits. It was still pissing down when i left, but at least i left with a smile and a blessing.
Make sure your bag is waterproof and you have flip-flops.
Aside from rain there is sun. It's very hot here in the summer, and the majority of the places you will go on a share bike are the unshaded rice paddies and coastal trails in the west. You can venture up into the slightly cooler foothills, where you will be shaded by bamboo and ankle-deep in mangos, bananas, pineapples, lychees and dragonfruit... but getting the bike into a dock for the night is going to mean heading back down to the paddies and the factories that make up the densely-populated plains.
Yeah, it's not much to look at. None of the super-touristy scenic parts of Taiwan are reachable on the public bike system. You can't get to the mountains. You can't get to the east coast. Or, well, i suppose you could, but you'd be losing the benefits of traveling by public bike in the first place - that is the very low cost and the freedom.
But i suppose it all comes down to what sort of stuff appeals to you. I like kinda desolate, run-down industrial-y areas. Weird square aquaculture ponds where migrant workers spend their days off blasting dance music and fishing with their buds. Odd little temples run out of some guy's garage. Rusting pavilions on tops of dykes where you can chat with random old folks drinking tea who seem to have just appeared there out of thin air. And, if you're on a YouBike adventure, you already have an interesting conversation starter, because what kind of nut rides one out to the middle of nowhere?
This kind of nut.
In the end, i had a blast, despite getting very fucking sunburnt, to the degree that the only thing i could do was keep riding bikes, because putting my pack on my back dug straight into the burn i got when i stupidly tucked my top into my bra for an afternoon to "cool off". Yeah, either wear long sleeves and a balaclava like the local fishermen do, or be prepared to slap on a shit-ton of SPF 50 and then still get burnt, following it with aloe and tears.
I was hoping on these two weeks to also get round to the east coast, maybe switch to traditional bike rentals around the tourist destinations, but honestly it was just way too relaxing bumming around industrial areas and rice paddies and the weird places in between towns where nobody goes. There's something very peaceful about not being anywhere in particular, not having any touts come at ya, no scenery looming round the corner that the next person you meet is gonna admonish you for missing. When you're not going anywhere, there's nothing to miss out on. When you're on a YouBike, there's no bike nerds stopping you to talk about what size tire you're running or which route you're following. You're just a person riding a bike. Life is pretty sweet.
I should explain first how the Taiwan public bike system works. This is not the sort of bike rental service that you find near backpacker hostels in touristy destinations around the world, where you swap your passport for a bicycle. 微笑單車 YouBike (stylized as Übike - 微笑 means "smile") is part of the public transport infrastructure of Taiwan. It's a public/private partnership between local transport authorities and the Taiwanese bicycle company Giant. They're designed to solve the "last mile" problem, helping people get from subway stations or other transit hubs to shopping centers, schools and so on.
For trips under 30 minutes on YouBike, you pay 5NTD, which is around 15 cents US, but even taking them out for several hours is fairly affordable. As well as being used by commuters, they are also popular with young people who take them for weekend rides along coastal or riverside greenways. If you have a 悠游卡 EasyCard public transport card, you simply tap the card on the handlebars to unlock the bike, and off you go. (It's been over a year since i originally set this up, but i think you may first have to download the mobile app - which will bind to your phone number - and register your EasyCard, then from that point on you just tap the card and go - no app or phone required.)
The bikes can only be picked up from and returned to designated docks, which at first glance would make them less useful for travelers hoping to use them as a serious form of transport around the country. Additionally, although the bikes themselves do not appear to have GPS, they are implicitly region locked in the sense that there are two different "versions" - the original one (orange bike) and YouBike 2.0 (white bike). You cannot return one to a dock built for the other because the connections are not compatible. I am not sure whether this is deliberate or not, but many cities and counties have the opposite version from their neighbor, which means you can't always use the same bike to cycle from one county to the next.
That said, there are still a surprising amount of docks outside of the major centers. Almost every train station down the west coast of Taiwan has a YouBike dock. Schools, universities, parks and temples are other good places to find a bike. But if you plan on touring, i recommend downloading an app to find all the docks. There are dozens of apps that claim to show all the docks (including the official YouBike apps), but some of them are dated and broken, only a few work across city/county boundaries and all of them are packed full of ads... I tried them all and the best one i can suggest is called 腳踏車抵家 BikesHere on Android, mainly because for the most part it gets out of your way. You will mostly need it when you get close to a border and need to switch bikes. Or you can just follow your nose, ask local people and hope for the best.
In case anyone is looking for a quick cheat sheet, here is what i found during my trip.
臺北/新北 Taipei and New Taipei City - YouBike 2.0
桃園 Taoyuan - YouBike 1.0
新竹 Hsinchu - YouBike 2.0
苗栗 Miaoli - YouBike 1.0
臺中 Taichung - YouBike 2.0
彰化 Changhua - Moovo (see below)
雲林 Yunlin - ⚠️ no share bikes!
嘉義 Chiayi - YouBike 2.0, but only in the city (see below)
臺南/高雄/屏東 Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung - YouBike 2.0
The way that i traveled was to take the bike to a dock as close to the city or county border as possible, then walk to the nearest dock on the other side. In some places like New Taipei City to Taoyuan, that can literally just mean across the road, but in other places you might need to hike 5 or 10km to the next dock.
The important places to know about are Changhua, Yunlin and Chiayi.
Changhua has made a deal with a Singapore company called Moovo for their public bike system, which uses the kind of bikes i am familiar with from what used to be 摩拜單車 Mobike (now 美團單車 Meituan Bike) in China. They are a GPS-enabled dockless bike made from flimsier stuff than the YouBikes, but it's worst of both worlds because even though the Moovo bikes are dockless, you can only pick them up and return them inside designated places where the GPS allows you to park. You will need to register on a different app and learn a bit of Chinese to use them because the bikes only report their status with a robot voice. The basic operation is to swipe your card (after you registered in the app) and then the wheel lock unlocks. To park the bike you need to move it into a special spot (it's painted on the ground in green), swipe your card again, then manually click closed the wheel lock, and the voice will confirm the price after you locked it.
But the worst part of this Moovo service is not the bike, it's the coverage. I could only find docks in the central parts of Changhua city, and in Yuanlin city - about 15km south of Changhua. Although you can freely ride around the rest of the county, you can't leave the bike anywhere else, so you're stuck doing a circle back to where you started. It was when i got to Changhua that i first took alternative forms of transport. First a single stop on a local train from the southernmost-station in Taichung into Changhua city, and then a bunch more stops out of Yuanlin further south.
Yunlin county (between Changhua and Chiayi) has no bikes at all that i can determine.
Chiayi is also a pain. They have YouBike 2.0, but only inside the main city part of Chiayi. Still - in my infinite wisdom - i saw there were YouBike 2.0 docks in Tainan, so i figured fuck it and rode out of Chiayi city, through the county and parked in Tainan... where i was hit with a massive 700NTD (US$22) fee on top of the usual amount which up until then had always been under 200NTD (US$6) per day. It was then that i figured i better find out what the rules are for taking YouBikes across the designated boundaries.
And here is the page that explains it all: 臺北市|YouBike微笑單車-收費方式 - https://www.youbike.com.tw/region/taipei/rate/ It seems it is fine to ride these bikes across the boundaries, but you could be hit with a fee of 600 to 1000NTD on top of the standard rate. If you are trying to travel on a shoestring, it's probably not worth it in most areas, but then again if you are traveling on a shoestring it would probably be cheaper to just take buses or trains across the country anyway. The whole point of taking a public bike is that it's a different way to travel.
I first got the idea when i was living in China, actually. Before COVID hit, i was thinking of taking share bikes all the way around the Pearl River Delta "long way" from Hong Kong to Macau. I had already done some overnight trips as an experiment. The great thing about using share bikes instead of traditional bike rentals or owning your own bike is the flexibility. If you don't feel like biking any more, you just return the bike, pretty much wherever you are, and go back to walking or busing or training or whatever form of transport takes your fancy. If you get to a cool mountain path where the bike won't go, you just leave the bike behind and go up the mountain. Of course, this is a little less true in Taiwan where the bike share systems are docked, so you can't just leave the bike anywhere, but it's still a hell of a lot more freedom than you have owning a bike, or being forced to return it back to the same city where you started.
You do have to be prepared to get minimal, though, because these bikes do not have racks. Which, depending on your situation, may or may not be easy to do. For me the way i usually travel is to work for a couple years, then quit work, then travel for a year, then go back to work again. But this time i was doing a conventional vacation where i had 2 weeks off from full-time work and a small apartment back in Taipei where i could leave most of my stuff. I tell you what, it is very, very different going traveling when you do not need to bring literally everything you own with you. When you can leave winter clothes behind. When you can live all your paperwork behind. When you can choose to not take a sleep system because you have cash for lodgings.
I got by fine with just my 30L Aquaquest waterproof backpack. I also had a drawstring bag into which i stowed two large water bottles, phone and other day supplies, set up in the front basket of the bicycle. Off the bicycle just bundle the drawstring bag into your backpack and go. The key piece of equipment was two ROK motorcycle straps i had left over from my bike tour across Turtle Island a couple years back. Honestly, i wish i had a couple more of these things. They are so much better than anything else at easily and quickly attaching your bag to a vehicle. Way better than old-fashioned bungees and much better than Voile straps too. The Aquaquest pack has webbing, which also helps a lot to strap it firmly onto shit. This is the kind of thing i will always be looking out for in any future travel products, if or when this stuff eventually falls apart.
The other thing you gotta be prepared for in Taiwan is rain. Depending when and where you travel, you might be able to get away with sneaking a week or two without a drop falling from the sky, but in most places and for most of the year there is always a thunderstorm looming. And big ass serious fucking storms at that. On literally the first day i left Taipei, it was burning hot 37 degrees outside, sunny and humid and extremely brutal going on a heavy, three-gear bicycle. Rain front came overhead and dumped enough to turn the next road i turned down into a river. I had taken shelter in a small hut next to a rice paddie while the lightning was overhead, thought it was safe to leave, until, yeah, ended up knee-deep in that muddy water. I made it out of that one and resolved to be a bit smarter next time. Which is how i ended up on top of a mountain 20km from the nearest town soaked to the bone. Fortunately i found a small temple where a guy brewed me up a pot of tea and shared candy and conversation to lift my spirits. It was still pissing down when i left, but at least i left with a smile and a blessing.
Make sure your bag is waterproof and you have flip-flops.
Aside from rain there is sun. It's very hot here in the summer, and the majority of the places you will go on a share bike are the unshaded rice paddies and coastal trails in the west. You can venture up into the slightly cooler foothills, where you will be shaded by bamboo and ankle-deep in mangos, bananas, pineapples, lychees and dragonfruit... but getting the bike into a dock for the night is going to mean heading back down to the paddies and the factories that make up the densely-populated plains.
Yeah, it's not much to look at. None of the super-touristy scenic parts of Taiwan are reachable on the public bike system. You can't get to the mountains. You can't get to the east coast. Or, well, i suppose you could, but you'd be losing the benefits of traveling by public bike in the first place - that is the very low cost and the freedom.
But i suppose it all comes down to what sort of stuff appeals to you. I like kinda desolate, run-down industrial-y areas. Weird square aquaculture ponds where migrant workers spend their days off blasting dance music and fishing with their buds. Odd little temples run out of some guy's garage. Rusting pavilions on tops of dykes where you can chat with random old folks drinking tea who seem to have just appeared there out of thin air. And, if you're on a YouBike adventure, you already have an interesting conversation starter, because what kind of nut rides one out to the middle of nowhere?
This kind of nut.
In the end, i had a blast, despite getting very fucking sunburnt, to the degree that the only thing i could do was keep riding bikes, because putting my pack on my back dug straight into the burn i got when i stupidly tucked my top into my bra for an afternoon to "cool off". Yeah, either wear long sleeves and a balaclava like the local fishermen do, or be prepared to slap on a shit-ton of SPF 50 and then still get burnt, following it with aloe and tears.
I was hoping on these two weeks to also get round to the east coast, maybe switch to traditional bike rentals around the tourist destinations, but honestly it was just way too relaxing bumming around industrial areas and rice paddies and the weird places in between towns where nobody goes. There's something very peaceful about not being anywhere in particular, not having any touts come at ya, no scenery looming round the corner that the next person you meet is gonna admonish you for missing. When you're not going anywhere, there's nothing to miss out on. When you're on a YouBike, there's no bike nerds stopping you to talk about what size tire you're running or which route you're following. You're just a person riding a bike. Life is pretty sweet.
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