Shared bikes seek a pardon in Barcelona for the next term

BarcelonaThe announcement on June 4th by the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, that licenses for shared bicycles will not be renewed and that from January 1st they will no longer be able to circulate in the Catalan capital took everyone by surprise. Including the operators that offer this service called bicisharing, who have since started a race to try to reverse the decision. Although they assume the city council will not change its mind and that by the end of the year they will have to store the bicycles in warehouses, they are confident they can turn things around after the municipal elections and obtain a pardon to operate in the city again.

To achieve this, the seven companies operating in Barcelona have started by trying to correct what has been their main Achilles' heel until now: the impact on public space of poorly parked bikes. This was the main argument brandished by Collboni when he announced the ban. He did so with data stating that, in just a year and a half, the city council had imposed 5,413 fines on these bicycles and the municipal crane had removed more than 2,000 of them.

The summer has only increased these figures, with a July in which the number of fines neared a thousand. From the bicisharing companies, however, they downplay the data and point out that they are negligible compared to the number of trips that have been made with these vehicles during that time, which they place at more than 3 million.

Despite the continued sanctions, the seven companies that manage this service – Bird, Bolt, Cooltra, Donkey Republic, Lime, RideMovi, and Voi – maintain that they have taken steps to address the disturbances caused by these poorly parked vehicles. They point out that since the end of 2024, they have coordinated with each other with a joint surveillance patrol in charge of correcting parking incidents. A patrol that they have reinforced this past summer, a gesture to claim that before suppressing shared bicycles there are other options to find a better fit in the day-to-day life of the city.

Despite working hand in hand on some things, the operators also distance themselves from each other. This week, Lime –one of the main companies in the sector with experience in cities around the world– has put another way to resolve the situation on the table. In their view, one of the main reasons that makes the service in Barcelona inefficient is that there are seven different operators for a service that manages a total of 3,478 bicycles. For this reason, the head of institutional relations for Lime in Barcelona, Joan Salarich, and the director of institutional relations for Lime Iberia, Chloe Clavell, have proposed a more restrictive tender that limits the service to only two or three operators.

The feeling at Lime is that in Barcelona the innocent are paying for the guilty and that the management of some less used companies has penalized the image of all the rest. For this reason, the possibility of redefining the tender is one of the options they want to put on the table of the municipal government that emerges from the elections in the month of May. Meanwhile, they admit that they will store their vehicles in warehouses waiting for better times.

The support of the opposition

The other great weapon they have to reverse Collboni's decision is political. Last July, Junts, Barcelona en Comú, ERC and PP allied to urge the mayor to rethink the decision to eliminate the shared bicycle service. At that time, they labeled the measure an "irresponsibility" that goes against sustainable mobility, and warned that the suppression of these vehicles could overload Bicing, strain other public transport means such as the metro and the bus, and even encourage people who choose this service to switch to private vehicle travel.

From the municipal government, however, it is maintained that the mayor's decision is unalterable and that starting January 1st there will be no shared bicycles on the city's streets beyond those of Bicing. They also maintain that the majority of their users are tourists. In the case of Lime, the company assures that 40% of its users are locals.