This morning as I was biking to work, I was pitched by a gang of bike enthusiasts near sagrada familia. They belonged to the Bicycle Association of Catalunya (BACC) and were handing out leaflets and gifts to other enthusiasts and bicycle amigos like me. They were there to rally for more bikes in the city!
Their gift, a black handbag with a big white bike on it contained a bell, a biking guide to the city and a BACC newsletter with interesting information about the organization and the projects it’s currently undertaking. With this campaign, BACC aims at raising awareness about this old, yet so timeless and sophisticated mode of transportation.
It’s a pity though that BACC´s communiqués are in Catalan. Given that Barcelona is a multilingual city, the organization misses out on a huge piece of potential target audience by choosing to target only Catalan speakers. From a communication stand point that’s a flaw.
Altogether the city of Barcelona is doing a great job in pursuing people to use bikes instead of conventional, energy consuming and environment unfriendly modes of transportation like cars, buses and motorcycles.
In March 2007 the city of Barcelona introduced Bicing, a service which allows subscribers to take out bikes from stations throughout the city for only 30 bucks a year using a chip card.
Bicing has some weaknesses though. For instance, you can only take out a bike for 30 minutes each time and stations are often found empty. Nevertheless, Bicing is working really hard to make improvements as the number of users keeps growing. Also, the city council is broadening its biking infra-structure by building more bike ways and improving traffic signals.
This is a great development for a city that, like other big urban conglomerates, struggles with serious problems caused by an overload of automobiles. My guess is that from now on the priority lies in educating people about using and respecting bicycles. This remains a challenge as many motorists and pedestrians just ignore bikers and don’t acknowledge them as a serious mode of transportation.
It might take some time, but for sure Barcelona is biking in the right direction.
