Toulouse: an Indigo Weel bike repaired in the city, one year after the cessation of activity
A year after the Indigo Weel shared bicycle activity in Toulouse was definitively halted, a bicycle in perfect condition, attached with its lock, was spotted on the public highway.
There were nearly 1,000 on the streets of Toulouse at their peak at the end of 2019. Indigo Weel shared bikes, recognizable by their white and purple colors, declined during the pandemic. They disappeared for several months, then are repaired in 2021.
Fire in the premises in 2021
Before the coup de grace dealt to this flourishing activity but weighed down by incivility, which had convinced more than 20,000 users: the fire of the company’s maintenance room, in Colomiers, in December 2021.
Several dozen bicycles and scooters, as well as their batteries, went up in smoke.
A year later, a man from Toulouse made an unusual discovery: an Indigo Weel bike in perfect working order, suspended from a hoop. It was located on boulevard Armand-Duportal, between the Brienne canal and Compans Caffarelli, a few days ago. Its perfectly readable serial number. Her white and purple hue was still the same. Its basket in good condition, its tires perfectly inflated.
A bicycle reappears on the road, in Compans-Caffarelli
How did this bike end up in this place? His tenant, who one day registered on the Indigo Weel application, is he still paying for the rental, twelve months after the withdrawal of the bicycles? Impossible. But he still manages to activate the lock, unlockable only through the application, theoretically.
Was it stolen? In this case, how did the company not identify it thanks to its geolocation chip system, which was fitted to all the bicycles in its fleet at the time of their withdrawal?
Contacted, the management of Indigo Group indicates that it “no longer has access to either the application or the remote management platform for self-service bicycles”. It therefore has “no way to geolocate and release it”.
Indigo also specifies that “after checking with our teams, it must not be a stolen bike because it is correctly attached to a hoop. Only the Indigo Weel application or the back-office could make it possible to detach it (if the lock is still operational)”. So the mystery remains. For the moment.