Full streets and empty stations. Chaos has been installed for several weeks in Bicimad, the electric bicycle rental service in Madrid. Specifically, since March 7, the date on which the City Council decided to offer this transport model free of charge to “encourage” and make it easier for “citizens to learn first-hand about the advantages offered by the renewed public electric bicycle system” that it is being extended “to all 21 districts” of the capital.
But the plan, which many users dismissed as electoral by extending until July 31 and coinciding with the next municipal elections in May, has failed miserably. And far from attracting new users, it is causing many of those already registered to seriously think about continuing to pay their fee when they have to check out again. All because, based on the fact that it is free, some citizens are misusing the equipment. A perfect storm against one of the bets of the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, for 28-M that the opposition does not intend to waste in the preview of the municipal plenary session this Tuesday at the Palacio de Cibeles.
Más Madrid has already made a move and will visit the facilities of the Municipal Transport Company on Wednesday to find out the opinion of the Bicimad workers about the “conditions of absolute disorder” in which the bicycle service has been expanded, and will value asking political responsibilities and “demand” that a plan be put in place to “save” it.
Cuca Sánchez, deputy spokesperson for the municipal group, said this Monday at the usual press conference prior to the municipal plenary session that the “experts” transfer to Más Madrid that it will be “necessary to close” Bicimad for a while so that the service can work again in a correct way.
“The application does not work, it is impossible to get bikes from stations, there are no bikes available, hundreds of new bikes have been lost that the Municipal Transport Company cannot find because when the battery runs out the GPS stops working” and they cannot be locate, Sánchez has listed.
The deputy spokesperson for Más Madrid has also announced that she will ask the EMT Council to hear explanations about the situation of Bicimad from the Environment and Mobility delegate, Borja Carabante, in order to assess whether to ask for political responsibilities.
Sánchez, who has censured that the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, “has burst” Bicimad, and that he has “managed to load it” as “he already did” with other municipal services such as the 010 telephone, has emphasized the 48 million euros, 30 of them from European Next Generation funds, which has cost the expansion of the public system of electric bicycles.
The controversy will land in plenary tomorrow at the proposal of the PSOE whose municipal spokesman, Mar Espinar, will ask the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, about “the chaos that has caused Bicimad in the last month.”
“Almeida is destroying a public transport service in which he has never believed, but which he uses to make his ads and sell the headline,” said Espinar, who assured that “users and workers” are suffering “punishment” because of these decisions.
“Bicimad is the clearest example of what this mayor’s management has been: selling what he believes will give him a space without caring about the city or the citizenry,” says the PSOE mayor, who affirms that the councilor He must give explanations for “this hasty implementation of 700 bicycles, of which 500 have already disappeared.”
