The metropolitan public bicycle service, which debuted more than a year ago in some municipalities, is about to complete its deployment. The AMBici electric bikes have already arrived in Sant Adrià de Besòs and in the coming weeks they will arrive in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, where the stations are already beginning to be installed almost a year behind the initially planned schedule.
With these two cities, the map of metropolitan Bicing will be completely created, which started successfully in some cities just before the municipal elections and shortly after came to a sudden stop. Its start-up has been delayed time and again due to various setbacks suffered, the main one being the lack of electrical connection at the stations that were supposed to recharge the bikes.
The slowness in the permits to connect to the Endesa network has slowed down the pending deployment and has forced it to operate throughout this time with some vans roaming around the cities in which it was already in operation. At night, the vehicles collected the bikes without batteries and took them to recharge in warehouses specifically set up for this purpose.
The problem has been solved in recent weeks and those responsible for the project hope to soon have half of the stations electrified. There will be just over a hundred, a milestone considering that at the end of the year there were still none of them.
The other half of the stations, as included in the initial plan, will remain disconnected since it is considered that with the rotation all the bikes end up passing through one of the automatic charging stations. If not, the fleet’s rebalancing vehicles will be in charge of moving them.
The second largest city in Catalonia has been left for last because it represents a great challenge for the service due to the large number of stations and bikes it includes. In addition, it incorporates three interchange stations between Barcelona’s Bicing and the metropolitan AMBici, a modality that has already had to increase the number of places in Zona Universitària to guarantee that users who combine both systems do not get stuck when they reach the border of the Catalan capital.
At the moment there are just over 1,800 active bikes with 168 installed stations. When it is extended to l’Hospitalet and the service is fully deployed it will have a total of 2,600 bicycles distributed in 236 stations in 15 municipalities, ranging from Badalona to Castelldefels and Molins de Rei passing through cities such as Cornellà and Sant Boi, leaving that to the outside Barcelona, ??which maintains its own system (Bicing) apart from the metropolitan system (AMBici).
As of today, the service owned by the AMB and managed by Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) already exceeds 22,000 users, who have made 1.8 million trips during all this time. The service exceeds 5,000 uses on average on a weekday and approaches 3,000 on weekends, a demand that those responsible for the service consider to have been higher than initially anticipated. In winter it has decreased slightly, while in summer the large number of uses related to leisure that were not foreseen in the conception of a service designed for mandatory mobility was surprising.
Badalona, ??Viladecans, Cornellà de Llobregat and Castelldefels are the municipalities where the most trips are being made. The stations located near the train stations are the most frequented and the time slots with the most use are the morning rush hour (between seven and eight), midday around two and in the afternoon from five to nine.
In this last period, there are more than 400 uses per hour on average and this is when there have been more critical situations for users since they arrived at the stations and saw them full of bikes without batteries that they could not use, an issue that is in progress. of solution with the electrification of the stations already installed and those that are in process.
