The City of Barcelona has in the last few months started a new campaign for public transport know as Bicing. They are setting up 100 bike racks at locations all around the city, buying thousands of bikes, and creating a green, traffic reducing and cheap way for tourists and locals alike to get around.
The way it works is that each city-owned Bicing bike rack has a computerized kiosk that reads your Bicing membership card. It automatically unlocks one of the bikes (usually about 20 per station), and you can then take the bike to wherever you wish to go, returning the bike to any of the 100 stations around the city. As a kickoff promotion, one full year's usage is only 6 Eur, with a regular non-promotional price of 24 Eur. Then, the first half an hour of usage is completely free. After that, its 0,30 per half hour up to two hours, and 3 Eur/hour after that.
This is perfect for us to go to our class at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, which otherwise is a 30-minute metro commute away and happens to have a Bicing station right outside. Unfortunately the closest bicing station to our apartment is about a 10-minute walk (with a closer one scheduled to open after we leave in June).
This is one of the coolest innovations in public transport I have heard of in a while, especially in a bike-friendly city such as Barcelona. Maybe other cities around the world will follow soon!
1 comment:
wow, that sort of thing seems almost unimaginable in america. can you imagine this working in any of our cities? the auto lobby would probably kill it in a nanosecond.
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