Bicycles

I cannot describe in words how useful a bicycle is here in Japan. At my dormitory, residents can borrow bicycles on a daily basis, and, unlike Mahidol's bicycles, we can also take them outside the campus. Having a bicycle makes the large campus and the 3 kilometers to the Tsukuba station very manageable. So today, I'm going to talk about a few interesting facts about bicycles in Japan.

Locks
While some people use locking chain like Thailand, there is another type of lock directly installed onto the wheel of the bicycle.

When it is locked, the metal prevents the bicycle's rear wheel from moving and when we unlock it, the key stays in the lock until we lock it again. Thus, we don't have to worry about if we've locked our bicycle or not — if we have the key, then it is locked. Another advantage is that we don't have to carry the locking chain around. However, there is a small disadvantage that we can't chain the bike to an immovable object, and in an isolated place, a thief might be able to just carry the bicycle away.

Parking
There are also a lot of bicycle parks everywhere, both paid and free. The paid parking space I've used is free for the first 3 hours, then it is ¥100 for 24 hours. The way this work is that there is a lock that locks the bicycle onto the parking slot. Before you leave, you'll have to enter the number of the parking slot into the machine and pay the fee, then the machine will unlock the bicycle and you can take it out. It, however, does not prevent strangers from paying and taking your bicycle, so you will still need your own bicycle lock.

The lock at the parking slot

The payment and unlocking machine

Other facilities
Because a lot of people use bicycles in Japan, people often think of bicycles when building public facilities.

The flyover is flat in the middle allowing people to drag their bicycles across it

This walkway is separated into 2 lanes — one for pedestrians and the other for bicycles

And that's it for today. Tomorrow is finally a weekend and I will spend it exploring Tsukuba — on a bicycle of course!