One of the emergency solutions implemented by the Madrid City Council to try to recover as soon as possible the hundreds of “dispersed or badly parked” bicycles scattered throughout the city has been the increase in the workforce -20 people distributed in ten teams- that works 24 hours a day on this specific task. And this “bike safari”, as the PSOE has renamed it, is already bearing fruit after exploring, in some cases, private urbanizations in the capital.
The mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, continues trying to minimize the damage caused by a failed electoral bid that consisted of making the service free until July. And he has declared that part of the fault “may be that the conditions under which bicycles must be left parked have not been properly communicated.”
“The problem is that, when they are left in places that can even be in private urbanizations where we are also locating bicycles, it is very difficult to reach all the bicycles, but, nevertheless, we are confident that this will be the case and therefore we are going to continue working”, the councilor has transferred.
Almeida has elaborated on the fact that there is a “significant number” of vehicles that are being left in places that are not suitable, and it is even “difficult” to locate them in those locations. “There is no other way than to assume that there are problems, because it is the first step to be able to solve them,” he acknowledged.
In this sense, the mayor has stressed that “the number of personnel who travel through the city in vans has increased, to which they load the bicycles they find to be able to take them to stations where there are no vehicles available” and that ” there are more people and better means to “be able to locate all the bicycles that are being left in places that are not suitable”.
