Stopping bike lanes in Barcelona's participatory budget
More than fifty initiatives on bicycle lanes are excluded from the vote
BarcelonaOne of the headlines of the first edition of Barcelona's participatory budgets were projects to build new bike lanes in the city. It's unlikely that they will be again this time. At the very beginning of this second edition, Barcelona City Council has excluded from the process almost all of the citizen initiatives that called for expanding the city's cycling network. According to ARA, of the nearly one hundred bicycle-related proposals submitted in the initial phase—which include changes to the bike lane network, but also other measures such as new parking—fewer than 20 have made it to the next phase, and of these, the vast majority have come with conditions.
Among others, proposals such as the installation of a new bike lane on Passeig Maragall, Passeig Torres y Bages, Avenida Balmes, and others have been excluded from the prioritization phase—the vote that is underway until next Wednesday and will decide which initiatives advance to the final phase. However, a proposal that called for the elimination of the Via Augusta bike lane, one of those created during the previous term following a proposal arising from the participatory budget, was also left out from the outset.
The group of evaluators—made up of seventy district technicians, from different areas and from the municipal infrastructure company BIMSA, as well as 15 participation technicians—has various arguments for setting aside these initiatives. For example, some proposals exceed the maximum budget allowed per project, existing plans conflict with the new lanes being requested, or the roads are too busy to open a bike lane, which would mean losing a lane.
The most repeated argument, however, is that the creation of a new bike lane "does not meet any of the conditions set forth in the decree calling for proposals" for the participatory budget. Unlike the first edition, this time the council has restricted the possible actions related to bicycles to just four: "Improving connections between lanes, lowering the roadway from lane to sidewalk, converting two-way bike lanes to one-way, and creating new bicycle parking spaces."
Municipal sources emphasize that the specifications "respond to the same criteria as the municipal government's strategy for this term"; that is, "reinforcing the network with connections between cycle routes and improving the infrastructure." In this regard, they emphasize that there are around thirty cases in which lanes have been rejected because they did not meet these criteria. Another twenty, they point out, have been rejected because the City Council is already considering actions that affect them.
In total, only five cycle lanes have made it to the next phase, and of these, only two – the extension of the Pintor Alsamora cycle lane and the extension of the Travessera de les Corts cycle lane – have done so as proposed and without being subject to future technical restrictions.
The council points out that many proposals always fail in this first technical screening and that, for example, on this occasion, of the 1,733 proposals submitted, only 789 were able to make it to the first vote.
The headaches of the previous edition
Also underlying these restrictions are the headaches that some of the bike lanes chosen in the recent participatory budgets have caused the City Council. Some, like the Via Augusta bike lane, were due to the controversy surrounding them. And others, like the Plaça Catalunya bike lane, were ultimately shelved by the current government, citing "technical difficulties."
