The Madrid City Council Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility delegate, Borja Carabante, celebrated this Tuesday that Bicimad, the public electric bicycle service that is currently free until December 31, recorded a new record of uses yesterday, exceeding the 30,000 travelers.
“Yesterday we made a new record in terms of users. For the first time in the history of Bicimad, we surpassed 30,000 daily uses, reaching 30,657. In 2019, to compare homogeneous data, 6,000 uses were reached on a day like today. Therefore, five times more than what was done in 2019”, Carabante explained to the press after a municipal act.
This increase in the use of Bicimad, the delegate continued, is due to three reasons, beginning with a “substantial commitment by this government team to expand Bicimad to all 21 districts.”
It is also due to the “execution of new bike lanes, which give an objective and subjective perception of safety that encourages the use of the bicycle.”
“70 kilometers of bike lanes have been built”, Carabante has added, and, as the last cause of the increase in the use of Bicimad, he has indicated the implementation of a “new mobility ordinance that encourages these modes of transport from the perspective of safety ”.
“For this reason, the ordinance of the city of Madrid establishes that minors under 16 who use a bicycle must wear a helmet”, as well as those people who use bicycles to work (“those known as raiders”) regardless of their the age they are, and also stipulates that the helmet is mandatory “when the scooter is used on the road, Carabante has recapitulated.
The delegate believes that “what these three perspectives do is promote the use of sustainable mobility, of the bicycle, from a perspective of road safety.”
On the other hand, Carabante has also been asked about information published this Monday by El Mundo about bicycle accidents (from 2019 to May 2023 there were 3,847 people involved in bicycle accidents, according to the aforementioned newspaper).
“It is true that the accident rate, the accident rate, on bicycles and scooters has increased somewhat, but it is also a consequence of the more substantial increase in the displacements that occur in these new modes of mobility,” said Carabante, after point out that road safety is “the main one for this government team when we talk about mobility”.
“It is true that it is an axis and a perspective that is often not talked about, not debated, but, of course, the main priority, when talking about mobility and circulation, is road safety,” he insisted.
For this reason, in the past mandate, “a road safety strategy was established whose main objective was to reach zero victims in the city of Madrid, but which had as its essential vertex to focus all actions on the most vulnerable groups”, it is In other words, “those modes of mobility that have appeared in recent years, especially scooters and bicycles.”
