How red bicycles became the target of Berlin’s anti-gentrification angst

Berliners are well aware of the city’s rapidly changing demographics. With 40,000 new residents arriving each year, housing prices doubling over the last decade and a new start-up popping up every other day, fears about being priced out of neighbourhoods are never far from mind. But if there is one thing that the capital is known for, it’s a love of protest. This is how residents stopped Google form opening a campus in the residential district of Kreuzberg and why expensive new restaurants in certain areas seem to find their windows perpetually broken with graffiti reappearing quicker than it can be washed off. The current focus of anti-gentrification vigilantes: Uber’s red Jump bikes.

On the surface, they seem fairly inoffensive, motorised bicycles that you can find via an app, rent by the minute and leave wherever your journey ends. The bright red colour of the bikes makes them easy to spot, but as many users have recently found, when you get closer to the bicycles they are often unusable. From slashed tyres, to scratched out and spray painted QR codes that make it impossibly to unlock the bikes, the defects are too frequent to be accidents or random vandalism – there is a web community dedicated to the instruction and documentation of disabling the vehicles, “Uber Platt Machen” or flatten Uber in English. “All of us are out and about, with friends or alone, from time to time in the city,” the group says on their website. “A pocketknife or screw driver always fit in your jeans pocket. Just don’t get caught.”

While the advice is fairly simple, their reasons for targeting the American ridesharing app are a little more complicated. On the surface, they claim the 10-euro per hour cost of the bikes attracts only tourists and the new class of wealthy Berliners – this privileged image of the riders is not helped by the fact that you don’t have to fully peddle these bikes – but the company’s gig-economy approach to employment is at the heart of their discontent. The graffiti on one of the bikes, “Break Unions/ Hide Rape/ Ride Uber,” sums it up pretty well, referencing the low wages and lack of social benefits given to drivers and slow responses to sexual assault. On top of its employment practices, the company, which directly benefits from state funded roads and sidewalks, has a bad reputation for tax dodging. For the anti-Uber group, it all points to a dangerous new capitalism that flaunts regulations aimed at protecting people to increase profits.

While Germany has been one of the countries putting up the most opposition to the ride-hailing app, outlawing Uber X this week, there are no signs pointing towards a potential crackdown on the company’s 1000 e-bikes in Berlin. The flatten Uber movement has taken it upon themselves to disable the red bikes that are left around the city’s streets in the hopes that it will be too costly for the company to keep repairing them. In the meantime, it may be wise to factor in some wiggle room for your journey if you plan to go by JUMP bike.