Happy birthday! Bicing celebrates anniversary
Bicing, Barcelona's public rental service, is celebrating its first anniversary. Despite a number of shortcomings and critics, the Catalan capital has almost fully implemented the system with 286 stations and 4,000 bicycles for 130,000 registered users. The plans aren't stopping here. The city will have 400 stations and 6,000 bicycles by the end of August once the expansion plan for the non-center districts is completed. Due to Barcelona's relatively small size (99 km2), neighbor municipalities are considering expanding the service to make it metropolitan.
Nevertheless, and despite the global satisfaction of the service, the system has problems. First of all, the chosen bike model wasn't sturdy enough. Newer bikes have better brakes and light system, as well as improved seats and wheels. Stations have also been plagued with problems, since the locking system has been found to be troublesome. There are also complaints about the system that redistributes the bikes among the stations, which is far from being perfect, despite having more than 10 vehicles and 120 workers. Finally, such an increase in the use of bicycles has proved that the bike lane network to be insufficient, and the City Hall is rushing to get more lanes built.
What is still good is the price: For 24 EUR/year you can use the bikes for 30 minutes any time you need to (paying 0.50 EUR additional for each half an hour in a particular stretch). Plans to create weekly passes for tourists have been postponed so far, so if you plan to visit around, borrow a friend's pass. Per molts anys! (Happy birthday).
[Source: El Periodico]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
GenWaylaid 6:16PM (3/28/2008)
I get the feeling that a bike rental system like this might be a huge hit in the Boston/Cambridge area.
My last employer has a free bicycle fleet for getting around their campus. You have to pedal like crazy to get the "yellow bikes" to go any decent speed, and the redistribution of bikes took a long time to become effective, but the biggest issue is that the whole system has to be B.Y.O.H. Buying an extra bicycle helmet for work and walking around with it was rather inconvenient.
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Jon Froehlich 9:45AM (6/09/2008)
If you're a Bicing user, we'd love your feedback...
We are a small scientific group at Telefónica I+D working on "green computing" research. In one of our projects, we are studying Barcelona’s Bicing system. Our goal is to apply advanced concepts in computer science to improve the Bicing experience, so that, for example the bicycles are better distributed in the city. This project is just beginning and we wanted to involve the most important piece of the Bicing system: its users! Therefore, we have created an online survey to acquire feedback about your experience (positive and negative) with Bicing. The survey will only take about 5-10 minutes to fill out and is completely anonymous.
English: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/jfroehli/56481
Català: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/jfroehli/56870
Castellano: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/jfroehli/56868
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