Barcelona aims for 30000 parking spaces for bikes - Cities Today

Barcelona city council is conducting a comprehensive review of its aboveground bike parking infrastructure, with plans to expand the number of spaces to 30,000.

Speaking at an EIT Urban Mobility Emerging Leaders panel at the Smart City Expo, Sílvia Casorrán, Sustainable Mobility Expert, Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona said there was an urgent need for more parking to ensure cycling continues to be a viable transport option.

“E-bikes are the way of the future, they really are the key,” said Casorrán.

“One of the failures in Barcelona is that we still don’t have a safe bike parking policy – there’s no way to park your own bike.”

As part of the review, the city council is also assessing underground bike parking and spaces at public transport interchanges.

There are over 1,000 spaces for bikes in underground car parks, with plans to increase this by 29 percent.

Aside from increasing the number of parking spots, Casorrán emphasised that more needed to be done on a holistic level to encourage cycling.

“All over Spain there really is a gender imbalance in terms of cycling, so there is a lot of work in front of us if we really want to become 100 percent cycling cities,” she added.

“One key area is ensuring that the traffic respect speeds limits, this is something that technology can really help with.”

The need to make cycling more inclusive was also echoed by Daniel Rádai, Budapest District 8 Deputy Mayor for Urban Development.

“In Budapest its quite similar. We’ve made a lot of improvements to cycling in recent years but I think what’s really important is to make it more inclusive.

“Smart technologies can help with inclusive mobility and the e-bike ecosystem – specifically looking at how to make it affordable, because basically this is what influences its popularity and will be the driving force between success and failure.”

Over the past five years Radai has focused on removing on-street parking for cars, filtering traffic and pedestrianising streets in District 8, one of the busiest parts of Budapest.

“With this policy we eventually managed to free up 20,000 square metres of public space for pedestrian use from areas previously used for parking.”

Superblocks

Taking space from cars and making cities more people-centric has been an ever-present theme in Barcelona over the past decade, with the city’s superblocks becoming a model for others.

“Superblocks are what we [cities] are all doing around the world – trying to give the city back to the citizens instead of to cars,” added Casorrán.

“The idea is quite simple though, it just involved making some streets one-way and taking away some parking spaces.

“But it’s a very emotive issue, people say ‘it’s my human right to park my car [on the street]'”.

Despite the overall popularity of the schemes among residents and its international appeal, last year the city council decided to end the creation of new superblocks – something Casorrán said was influenced by the politicised nature of the scheme.

“One year ago we had an election [in Barcelona] and a change of government, and the new government decided to put zero euros in the budget for superblocks, meaning there would be no new schemes.

“But I think this was because the previous government took the concept of superblocks very much as part of their identity,

“So I think the lesson is we should never align city projects along a political angle.”

Image: smart city expo