Electric bikes are handy but why must they be used as garbage bins on wheels?

I don’t want to shock you but I am very promiscuous. Well, when it comes to city transport. I’ll go home with a London taxi, an Uber driver, a big old bus, a tube too. Or, if there’s no better option, under my own steam. And, even if it never co-ordinates with my outfit, I will use a Lime bike, that ugly beast that’s now available in more than 200 cities.

But there’s one very irksome thing about them: wondering what the hell you will find lingering in the green bucket-shaped basket at the front of the contraption. Because it seems that whatever city you go to, locals are under the impression that these are garbage bins. Demi-devoured doners, half a dozen empty beer cans, unwanted boyfriends – you never know what you’ll find lingering there.

I had to nip across Rotterdam by Lime bike on Thursday (I’ll explain more in a moment) and was hoping that the Rotter folk might be better behaved. But no, each available bike had some unwanted gift awaiting me. Even when they were parked next to actual bins people had deposited their detritus in the baskets.

So, if people love Lime-disposal so much, perhaps the company should just embrace this and sponsor garbage trucks in key cities with giant green buckets attached to their fronts? No more littering – everyone would be waiting for their chance to lob a banana skin into the big green basket. And the company would get great brand kudos.

Now my Rotterdam dash combined two things: I wanted to see some of the projects that were being discussed at the Utopian Hours urbanism event that I was in town for. I had also just discovered that I needed to get a yellow-fever certificate for an epic work trip to Latin America that kicks off next week. And I had tracked down a clinic able to help with a jab. The nurse was efficient but the best thing about her was her slightly subversive bedside manner. “Be very careful of the mammals in South America,” she cautioned with a sudden earnestness. “If they bite you, go straight to the hospital because you could get rabies. And then you will die,” she concluded with a smile that seemed a little reminiscent of Mike Myers’ Dr Evil. I liked her. But she had me worried.

Later, unnerved by the Latin American house of mammalian horrors that I am about to enter, I thought it would be wise to check out some of my potential killers. Now while the big-eared opossum looks like it could be a pal, I think that the white-eared opossum might take a finger or two from you in a fight. And the red howler sounds like someone I once dated – definitely staying away from him. As for Stephen Nash’s titi – I don’t want to see one of those up close ever again. I just hope none of these beasts is partial to napping in a Lime bike basket. I have my concerns. 

I realise that I should have used this column to tell you more about Rotterdam, or at least the brilliant content of Utopian Hours but, hey, this is my column and I make up the rules here. Though I will invite you onto the roof of the year-old, migration-focused Fenix museum in Rotterdam. 

On Thursday evening, Utopian Hours, in partnership with Droom en Daad, the foundation behind the museum’s creation, held a reception here as the sun very slowly made its exit. The space is in a vast converted warehouse that was re-engineered by Mad Architects. It’s spectacular and sits on the very docks where a century ago, Europeans looking for a better life in America or Canada boarded ships to cross the Atlantic – many never seeing their birth nations again. Below us water taxis cut through the sunset-blushed waters. And Rotterdam, with its mix of new towers, 1960s architecture and wide boulevards, looked like a place of reinvention and change. Hard to pigeonhole.

As I wended my way back to the hotel, driving my bright-green garbage cycle (with one buckled pedal dancing away like it was at a rave), I thought about the power of good cities, of good conferences. But all the time I kept a watchful eye out, just in case a brown tent-making bat or Paraguayan rice rat was lingering in the bushes. You cannot be too careful – just ask my nurse.