The mayor of Valladolid, Óscar Puente, has assured that the data from the first month of service of the municipal bicycle loan system, ‘Biki’, “warn that the bet is and will be a success”, since in these 28 days of February, 5,200 registered users have been reached and 23,249 uses have been registered, “more than double” than a month of February with the previous ‘Vallabici’ concession format.
As Puente has explained in a thread that he has published on his profile on the social network Twitter, this Wednesday marks one month of the entry into service of ‘Biki’ and although he assures that “it is early to draw definitive conclusions” the data indicates that “it was worth it”.
In the first month of Biki’s life, 23,249 uses have been made, more than double that of any February with the previous system –concession to a private company– and almost twice more than the historical maximum number of uses of Vallabici in one month.
Every working day, Puente added, almost 900 daily uses are made on average, with a record of 1,066 reached on Thursday, February 16, while the lowest data was 441 on the 23rd, when snow fell. As Óscar Puente has clarified, these are downward corrected data, since the initial counts show uses that correspond to the three-minute “grace period” to change bikes.
Currently, as he has stressed, the initial forecast for the first month of use is “triplicated”, although the City Council and Auvasa hope to reach 2,000 uses per day this first year. It should be noted that during the month of February a campaign of 50 percent discount on rates has been in force, which has made registration more attractive, but which ended on Tuesday the 28th.
The number of registered users has been 5,200, “with sustained growth to date”, a figure that Puente has described as “spectacular” since the maximum that Vallabici reached dates from 2019, after six years of service, and was 2,016 subscribers, a figure that has tripled in just one month of service.
Users of mechanical bike rates predominate, representing 60 percent of the total registrations. However, those from Valladolid who use electric bikes make 1.59 uses per day on average, while those using mechanics make 1.33.
This, added to the fact that there are fewer electric bikes available at the stops, means that each of them is used 2.33 times a day compared to 0.85 times a day for mechanics.
The rates with the most use are the annual subscription for mechanics, followed by the electric and the monthly electric.
As for the stations — 83 of the 96 planned are in service — the one located in Plaza de Zorrilla is the most used in the system, with 625 “arrivals” of bikes; ahead of Paseo de Zorrilla, 132 (Corte Inglés), with 595; Plaza de Poniente and Fuente Dorada, both with 575.
The average duration of the trip is 13.53 minutes, with “little difference between mechanical and electrical users”, although voucher users make shorter trips. “In less than 15 minutes, therefore, users arrive at their destination,” stressed the councilor in a veiled reference to the concept of ’15-minute city’.
Virtually all trips (98 percent) are less than 30 minutes.
As an anecdote, Óscar Puente has added that the record number of uses by a single user has been 122 throughout the month, while the user who has used it the most in a single day made twelve trips.
