The management in the hands of the municipal transport companies, the investment in the maintenance of the service, as well as the simplicity in the procedures, are some of the keys for a shared public bicycle system to promote a culture of active mobility, different specialists agree .
Days after the inauguration of the new Bicimad -the bicycle loan service for the city of Madrid that has started this week under a barrage of criticism-, various groups of urban cyclists and environmentalists have valued to EFE what a public bicycle scheme should be like shared to favor active mobility and not generate rejection in the population.
Álvaro Heredia, a mobility expert and manager of the Madrid Municipal Transport Company (EMT) when Bicimad became municipal, warns that “as in any public transport system, the user penalizes a lot for lack of reliability” and, for example, if the station is full when it is time to leave the bike “and that happens not once but up to three times, the fourth time you have already lost the user”.
Heredia points out that in Spain sometimes “they do not work well in dimensioning the system adequately”, because although “sometimes we think that everything that has to do with the bicycle is a recreational thing, these services are very complex, much more than almost any other public transport system”, he assures.
Among other reasons, the expert stresses that, as it is an individual transport, “it is difficult to predict and adjust the flows that exist”, which “not only depend on the stations or the number of bikes available but also on the logistics that exist behind that rocking”.
Thus, all the cyclist groups, such as environmentalists and mobility experts consulted, consider it important, for a public bike system to work, that it be in the hands of the municipal transport companies, which already have experience in planning and with data on daily intercity transfers.
From En bici por Madrid they celebrate that the BiciMad service is going to be extended to all the districts of the capital, since “it can be measured” with cities with more cyclists such as Barcelona or Paris, predicts Iván Villarrubia, spokesman for this organization.
Madrid starts out at a certain disadvantage compared to other large capitals, Villarrubia points out, because, to begin with, its own orography makes it difficult to move between neighborhoods -crossed by hills- without the help of an electric bicycle, which is more expensive and heavier than a mechanical one.
Unlike even cities like San Francisco, known for its steep slopes that can nevertheless be overcome, “in Madrid the heart of the city is in the upper area, with valleys dividing it,” says the cyclist.
And this dependence on electric assistance on the bicycle makes a public bicycle service even more relevant, emphasizes Villarrubia, but more expensive and complicated to manage.
Although he warns of the potential problem of distributing bicycles in the stations, Villarrubia considers it impossible to design a public bicycle system “in which people distribute themselves evenly throughout the city”, unless urban planning favors the existence of neighborhoods that are almost exclusively residential and others more commercial or office.
However, the cyclist judges that the imbalance could be alleviated in the cities, as they are designed, if the public bicycle service rewards -paying users- for returning bicycles to the most unoccupied stations, something that the specialist also supports in mobility of Ecologistas en Acción, Carmen Duce, for whom the most important thing for these models to be effective is “simplicity” in mobile applications and in the vehicles themselves.
Heredia, however, does not consider that the payment or reduction in the rate is so effective, because in his experience with Bicimad, the measure did not finish improving the replacement of bicycles, according to his account.
Other experts fear that making the service free during the first months -something that, according to the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, was decided precisely taking into account the problems that migration from the old service to the new one would cause- will not help to respond to the “poor condition” of the bicycles of the previous Bicimad.
“We have seen how the initial investment for the development of public bicycle services was an obstacle for many city councils that, when the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience plan arrives, have not hesitated to request the full investment”, criticizes the spokesperson for the ConBici association, Laura Vergara.
Vergara judges that the repair, maintenance and personnel services associated with the new Bicimad project are “clearly insufficient”, while the maintenance costs of these services are usually very high, and more so in the case of electric bicycles.
“We do not know the accounts that the City Council and the EMT have made of resources associated with that public bicycle service to establish its free status,” he stresses.
