Bcycle In Nashville: Everything you need to know

When you’re riding a bike, you have to adhere to some safety precautions. Just as a refresher, we have 10 Bike Safety Tips that will help you along your ride.

BCycle in Nashville, Tennessee

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At its core, BCycle is a rideshare app. So, that means is you’re allowed to borrow a bike for a certain amount of time and then it’s intended that you put the bike back so someone else can ride it.

BCycle seems to cater more towards locals, who maybe don’t have a car and need to borrow a bike to get to work or run errands.

This is a different mentality than Bird or Lime, which is geared towards tourists and visitors who are going a short distance and don’t feel like walking.

Bird and Lime charge by the minute — and charge quite a bit per minute. One was $.69 and the other was $.71 per minute. This is to encourage you to use them for a short amount of time, not longer travels.

BCycle was $23 for an entire day.

But the thing about BCycle is you’re only able to take out the bikes for 120 minutes at a time. After that, you’ are’re charged a very high usage fee ($3.50 for the first 30 minutes) for going over two hours.

However, the best way to use it is to ride around, return the bike to a station within your 120 minute allotment, then just take the bike back out. Every time you return it to the docking station, the time resets.

Within the BCycle app, there’s a map with all of the docking stations marked. However, the address of the station is actually written as cross streets rather than a proper address. So, what I kept having to do was look at the map and find the park or business that was closest to the station and put that address into my phone to get directions.

And then it sort of turns into an adventure.

It feels like The Amazing Race because, at one point, we knew there was a station near Centennial Park, but we didn’t exactly know where it was. So we got to the general vicinity and then had to look around for the station.

Nashville is broken up into a few distinct locations, like downtown, The Gulch, Music Row, Germantown, etc. Each district has at least one BCycle station, so if you do decide to take the bikes, you can visit pretty much every area in Nashville.

That’s exactly what we did.

The only area we skipped was East Nashville because it’s on the other side of the Cumberland River. There is the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge that, as far as I know, is pretty safe to cross however, I personally didn’t feel like riding a bike across a bridge.

East Nashville is actually pretty cool. That’s where Nissan Stadium, where the Tennessee Titans play, is. There are also a lot of dive bars where the locals hang out that I was interested in checking out, but there were other sites we wanted to see more.

We took the bikes down the other side of the river, where we stopped at Fort Nashborough before riding all through Printer’s Alley, into Germantown to hang out before Nashville Oktoberfest, which is one of the longest running festivalz in the southeast, to the Nashville Farmer’s Market and the Tennessee State Museum, and all the way to Centennial Park to see the Parthenon and the Taylor Swift bench.

We even rode it to the other side of Centennial Parkway to Springwater Supper Club, the oldest continuously open bar in Tennessee.

There aren’t any BCycle stations really close to Springwater Supper Club, which is a little bit surprising because it’s very close to Vanderbilt University (and you would think college kids would rent bikes). But we were able to lock the bikes up on a street sign while we were inside.

That’s actually something that’s really good to know.

Personally, I prefer dropping the bikes off at a BCycle station and then walking to get to the museum or bar so I don’t have to worry about time.

But, in some instances, the BCycle station may not be close to your destination, so it doesn’t make sense. In those instances, you want to lock the bike somewhere.

Each bike is equipped with a locking mechanism that sits in the basket of the bike. When you need it, you take it out, wrap it around the frame or wheel of the bike and something stable, like a street sign or metal pole. Then, stick the lock into a hole near the basket. That triggers a key to pop out. When you put the key back in and turn it, that pops out the locking mechanism and unlocks the bike.

It’s just me, but it kind of reminded me a little bit of how you release the quarter when you return your ALDI shopping cart.

Once I felt really comfortable locking and unlocking the bikes, that really opened up Nashville for us.

To be very honest, I’m not good at riding a bike. I didn’t really learn until I was way older and kept to really flat areas. Even when we ride around our community, it’s really flat so I feel comfortable.

Where I grew up, there was a huge hill off of my street. If my friends wanted to ride past that hill, I would push the bike up and down. I never felt comfortable riding up and down.

Broadway in Nashville is a large incline. The hill isn’t as drastic as the one I grew up by, but it’s pretty steep if you’re a little uncomfortable on a bike.

However, all of the bikes in Nashville are electric bikes. So, as long as you remember to turn them on, the bike will assist you. You can feel it kick in sometimes and give you a little push. This was so helpful for me because I didn’t get as tired as I did when we were in San Antonio because, when we were there, most of the bikes were pedal bikes. San Antonio did have a few e-bikes, but we weren’t quite sure if we were able to take them out with our pass, so we used the pedal bikes.

We only rode bikes one day in San Antonio and my legs were like wobbly Jell-O by the end of the day. Thank goodness we were flying home the next day because I’m not sure I could have walked around the city next day.

But, in Nashville, because of the e-bikes, we rode almost nonstop for three days, and I still felt great.

That’s another thing to know.

We did ride from the late afternoon until evening, three times. That meant riding home in the dark. Luckily, when you’re riding at night, there is a headlight on the front of the bike that illuminates as soon as you unlock the bike, so that leads your path and alerts pedestrians about you.

There’s also a reflector in the back, so people behind you can see you as well.

I actually felt really safe riding home in the dark, which surprised me because I was a little bit worried before we started. But I felt totally safe.

I found a coupon code which gave us a 30 day pass for only $12. It’s usually $35, so that was a huge savings.

But also, we would have spent so much money on Uber or Lyft rides to go everywhere we went if we didn’t have access to the bikes. We saved close to $100 in potential rideshare costs by riding. We also had more freedom because we could see more and stop when we wanted rather than just going straight to the destination that we put in the ride.

If you are a Nashville resident, BCycle has a program with the Nashville Public Library where you can use your library card to rent a bike for free for a week with a NPL BCycle pass.

That’s a really nice service for locals who need the bikes for life as supposed to travelers who are using it for vacation.

The BCycle App

In order to rent BCycle bikes, you need to download the BCycle app. It’s free to download from the Google Play or the Apple App Store.

You can register for a BCycle Nashville account, then purchase your hourly, daily, or monthly pass directly from the app.

The app has a map with all of the stations in the area. Each station has a numbered indicator, which tells you how many bikes are available and how many open spaces there are.

When you’re looking to take bikes out, you want to make sure there are enough bikes at the station for your whole group. If not, you’re gonna want to go to another station.

The app has a built-in GPS, which knows where you are when you’re using it, so it knows what BCycle station you’re at when you get there.

The station has numbered spaces, some of which have bikes parked there and some that don’t. You hit a large blue button that says unlock and choose the number that coordinates with a bike. That unlocks the bike (you’ll hear it) and you have a few seconds to pull the bike out from its parking spot.

When you’re returning the bikes, you can return them to any station, but you need to return them to an open slot. So, check in the app to see how many available slots there are at the station before heading there. If there’s only one open slot and you’re two people, you need to go to another station because only one of you would be able to return a bike there.

We did run into a case where there was only one bike available at a station so we didn’t choose that one, but we never ran into a situation where there was only one empty slot to return a bike.

Within the app, you can see your activity. That lists the time you took the bike out and from what station. So, a little quick math will tell you how long you’ve had the bike out and help to assure that you return it on time (because you will be charged if you return the bike late — even if it is literally one minute late. Ask me how I know that there is absolutely no grace period).

When you return a bike, the timer will stop and you’ll be able to see how long you took the bike out and the distance that you traveled. You don’t pay per mile, but it is interesting to see how far you’ve gone.

Every time you take out a bike and return the bike, you get an email confirmation. You don’t need to keep the emails for a reference or anything like that, but it is a good way to assure that you pushed the bike in all the way and BCycled registered your return.

BCycle In Nashville: Frequently Asked Questions