The future of the bike in Barcelona

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Anyone who has set foot in a Chinese city in recent years will have noticed that the streets are full of new bicycles of all kinds of colors. These are shared bikes from companies like Mobike or Ofo, which have already landed in Europe (Berlin, Florence, Madrid) and which in Barcelona we look at as if they were the eleventh plague of Egypt.

This new generation of bike sharing takes the Bicing model further: it is no longer necessary to leave the bicycles at stations because they can park anywhere. To use them, the user registers with their mobile, unlocks the bike with an application and pays a certain amount (from a few cents upwards) for every half hour of pedaling. And when you arrive at your destination, you park it right there and the bike is available to the next person.

Here we have thrown our hands up at these shared transport models –be they bikes, cars or electric scooters– because we consider that these companies occupy public space with private vehicles and that cannot be allowed. The argument is, at the very least, shocking: do we not allow thousands of private motorcycles to park in public space? (in 2015 we had 273,718, many of them on sidewalks). Do we not have the streets full of private cars occupying thousands of public parking spaces?

According to municipal statistics, Barcelona has 5,500 cars per km2, while cities like Amsterdam or Berlin do not exceed 1,300. This monstrosity makes us the fifth most polluted city in Europe, we have twice the pollution of other European cities and this causes 3,400 premature deaths per year. And a large part of this pollution is caused by motorcycles, as Lluís Brau explained in an article that caused a lot of controversy last year.

Given the ease of use of these new Bicing systems (you would find the bike parked in front of your house, and you could leave it at the office door, next to the thousands of motorcycles that are already there right now), we can assume that many Barcelonians would sign up to cycle, with the immediate drop in pollution levels that this would imply. There would be more bicycles circulating, which would be solved with more bike lanes. In addition, it is estimated that shared bicycles are used 10 to 15 times a day, so a single bicycle would serve many more Barcelonians than any car, motorcycle, or private bike, which also occupy space and only make an average of 3 daily trips. Experts invoke "spatial justice" to refer to the current abuse: today, cars occupy 60% of public space, and are only used in 20% of trips.

There are many ways to transform Barcelona into the Amsterdam of Southern Europe, and not all of them involve bicycles getting out of control. I am the first one who, when I hear about the collaborative economy, puts my hand in my wallet, but sharing means of transport is more efficient than everyone having their own. This is like drills: is it necessary for every house to have one, if we use it once a year? Couldn't we share them?

To begin with, the City Council could establish strict rules of the game for the entry of these companies. That a percentage of the income would go to the city, in the form of a fee for the maintenance of bike lanes, for example. The areas where they should be parked could also be clearly delimited. And if we don't want them on the sidewalks, perhaps we could allocate one out of every ten parking spaces for automobiles to bicycles, considering that 10 bicycles fit in the space occupied by one car.