Students come up with creative cycling apps
This summer, it’s hard to miss the #posifiets campaign in Maastricht. The goal is to get more people riding their bikes, but also to show how you can bike in a way that makes you happy and doesn’t bother anyone else. Student organisation Maastricht Entrepreneurs joined the campaign with a bike challenge. The winner was Öykü Bingöl from Turkey, who will be studying in Maastricht starting in September.
Everyone can agree that Maastricht is a cycling city. This is a good thing of course, because cycling is healthy, good for the environment and inexpensive. The city and Maastricht Bereikbaar encourage people to ride their bicycles, by providing sufficient bicycle parking spaces and by rewarding positive bikers (#posifietsers) with offers from local businesses, among other things.
Many of the town's cyclists are students. Especially for them, Maastricht Entrepreneurs organised a competition in which they were challenged to find creative solutions for cycling behaviour, safety and/or abandoned bicycles.
Pitches
Via Zoom, the three finalists pitched their ideas to an expert jury. First-year student Maddalena Verdolini kicked off with Bi-Key, a plan to provide bicycles with a number plate or a QR code, so they can always be traced back to their owner if, for example, they are stolen or parked incorrectly.
Ashly Pineda came from the Philippines, first to study in Eindhoven and now in Maastricht for her master's degree in biomedical sciences. After searching for a while, she found a suitable bicycle on Marktplaats. “I am short, so most bicycles don’t fit. I have to get used to cycling in Maastricht, but I regularly hear from people that their bikes have been stolen. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I want mine to be safe in any case.”
Ashly saw the call for the bike challenge through social media. She came up with the iQode system, which identifies bicycles and their owners by means of a QR sticker. City employees can read the data via a scanner. This way, they can trace the owners of ‘lost’ bicycles, so they can pick up the - possibly stolen - bicycle again.
Restaurants
The soon-to-be new UM student, 19-year-old Öykü Bingöl, had a different approach. She wanted to stimulate cycling among students and everyone else in Maastricht. To do this, she proposed the MyBike app, which gives you points for every kilometre you cycle. If you reach a predetermined number of points, you get a discount at one of the affiliated restaurants in the city. “This makes it more attractive for everyone to cycle, and at the same time entrepreneurs can promote themselves through the app.”
The jury thought it was a good and feasible idea, rewarding Öykü with a €300 prize. The other two finalists didn’t go home empty-handed; they each received €250 and were invited to join the winner, the City and Maastricht University to explore whether the three ideas can be combined into one.
Clean-up actions
The jury praised the students' enthusiasm for thinking about the quality of life in Maastricht, in some cases even before they live here. “It’s great that students take the initiative to contribute to making Maastricht a great city to live in.”
Apart from the bike challenge, student associations as well as other groups have already thought about solving some of the bicycle problems in the city. Clean-up actions for lost or abandoned bicycles have been announced, and there are plans to collect and recycle old and leftover bicycles from students.
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