The sun was hammering down outside the Meliá Frankfurt City Hotel when I first spotted them: a row of brightly coloured, three-wheeled cabs lined up like oversized tricycles, each with a canopy stretched over two passenger seats.
Our guide waved us toward one with a grin. “Hop on,” she said. “This is how you see Frankfurt properly.”
I had expected a tuk-tuk. What I got was something gentler - a Velotaxi, pedalled by a driver with an electric motor quietly doing the heavy lifting. No engine roar, no exhaust, just the soft sound of wheels on tarmac and the occasional ring of a bell to clear pedestrians from our path.
Beside me sat Lyn Hughes, Editor at Wanderlust Travel Media from Windsor, UK, who has ridden her share of pedicabs at festivals and tourist trails back home. “This feels different,” she said, settling into the open-air seat. “Less like a gimmick, more like actually getting somewhere.”
Our driver was no ordinary pilot: Christian Kügler, Owner and Managing Director of Velotaxi Frankfurt GmbH, took the handlebars himself. As we pulled away from the hotel forecourt and into the flow of city traffic, the heat that had been pressing down on the pavement seemed to lift. With no windows, no glass, no air conditioning fighting the outside world, the breeze we generated simply moving through it was cooling enough - a strange, simple luxury on a sweltering summer day.
We wound through Frankfurt’s main thoroughfares before dipping into greener territory, past the manicured lawns of the Palmengarten and into the shaded avenues of Grüneburgpark, one of the city’s largest green lungs. Cars queued at a junction nearby; we simply slipped around them; Christian said that in heavy traffic, a Velotaxi is often quicker door-to-door than a car or tour bus, since it needs no parking directly at the destination and can thread through spaces larger vehicles cannot reach.
Between turns, Christian talked about the business almost affectionately. The idea began in 2004 under founder Matthias Graf; Christian took over the company this January after 13 years with the firm, having started as a bicycle mechanic and worked his way up. “It was not a leap into the unknown,” he told me, “but the next logical step.”
Today, he said, the company leans less on short hops and more on corporate clients, event transfers, guided sightseeing and mobile advertising - a mix that has made the business sturdier than in its early years. Velotaxis, he stressed, are not meant to compete with buses or trains but to solve the ‘last mile’ problem, while quieting streets and nudging cities toward a more human pace.
Could it work somewhere like Muscat? Christian was cautiously optimistic. “I can especially imagine Velotaxis being successful in tourist areas, along waterfront promenades, in historic districts or for hotel transfers,” he said, noting that safe cycling routes and short distances would matter most.
By the time we rolled back to the hotel - warm, slightly damp from the summer heat, yet oddly refreshed - I finally understood what he meant about choosing experiences over mere transport. It wasn’t the fastest way to cross Frankfurt downtown, but it was unquestionably the most memorable. Everywhere we went, curious pedestrians paused, smiled and reached for their phones to photograph our quirky pedal-powered vehicle, turning our ride into an attraction in its own right.
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