Unlike in Copenhagen and Sevilla, Barcelona's public bike system is only available to residents. This is primarily to protect the bike rental businesses. As a tourist I was of course, unhappy about this. If public bikes are a dimension of public transport, it means that this mode was unavailable to me. I'm not going to rent a bike for a 15 minute trip. The theory is that tourists come without the car and use public transport. I think there should be a way for tourists to use Bicing as public transport but not compete with the rental biz. The way to do that would be to price longer use by non-residents at a very high rate, say 10 € per hour after the first hour. That way people could use the Bicing to get to the bike rental places.
There is the question of whether the system could handle tourist use. Maybe Bicing should be made available only to tourists from Chicago?
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There is a rumour going around that you can use bicing as a tourist if you go the the office below the Columbus column.
ReplyDeleteBut I have never tried it and know of nobody who did.