Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SMART BIKING (Safe parking system for bicycles)

Teaser

As has been said many times, the bicycle is the most efficient and effective mode of transportation in urban areas for trips under 8km of distance as it is a solution that improves mobility and reduces congestion. For electrical bicycles, distance increases above 15km. The use...

Summary

As has been said many times, the bicycle is the most efficient and effective mode of transportation in urban areas for trips under 8km of distance as it is a solution that improves mobility and reduces congestion. For electrical bicycles, distance increases above 15km. The use of bicycles as a mode of transportation has many benefits to society as a whole, environmental benefits, reduce sedentary, improves cardiovascular health, easy-of-use, low cost, face Europe’s population aging, etc. In addition, the use of bicycles is widespread throughout the world, all cultures and economical levels, age, gender... Therefore, the image and perception people have toward bicycles in countries worldwide has been positive lately.
According to the EU bicycle policy challenges, governments have promoted different strategies to promote their use, such as bike lanes, 30 zones, traffic lights for bicycle, bike sharing systems (conventional and electrical), simple parking, among others, that are resulting in an increase of the use of private bicycle as a mode of transportation in cities. However, one of the main challenges that cities and Europe are currently facing is the theft of bicycles.
This increase creates the need to manage parking on destinations. In this way, users are demanding secure parking due to the high number of bicycle thefts that occur in cities. The promotional campaigns of the bicycle tend to draw attention to the need to protect the bike properly using the anti-theft devices. However, despite these measures, the theft remains the main obstacle for the private use of the bicycle as a mode of transportation. Therefore, companies are developing new parking solutions with built-in safety systems to satisfy these needs.
Both administrations and private companies are already implementing and paying for parking solutions for people who travel by bicycle, as it was done before with other private transport modes.
In this context and in order to tackle one of the main EU bicycle challenges, Vadecity has created vadeBike (product and service), an innovative product and service of bicycle parking: smart, safe, easy-of-use, with high efficiency of the utilization of the space, good cost efficiency and added value for money.
Link video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-OdZuOhdGY
The main socioeconomic impact expected is the increase of the use of the bicycle as mode of transportation, in benefit of the whole society, reducing the number of thefts and providing organized locations to park the bike comfortably.
Therefore, we can affirm that the global impact of the project is the reduction of congestion and pollution in large urban areas. This objective is directly linked to the challenges of the European Commission on the management of urban mobility.

Work performed

Throughout its duration, from 2017 until now, Vadecity has worked in the development of the new generation of its product and service, and in the preparation of the pilot in Barcelona.
The new parking infrastructure is now safer, easier to install, with energy autonomous and has lower cost of production and maintenance, which are key issues to its implementation. Digital platform has as well been improved, with new features, as the possibility to integrate different networks to collaborate in mutual benefit. These new features allow the service to be more attractive and competitive for potential customers; and contributes to increase the number of users.
Vadecity decided to focus the H2020 project in the city of Barcelona, to demonstrate the benefits and success of the service. Once the project will be consolidated in Barcelona, the plan is to replicate the project in those worldwide urban areas with similar characteristics.
On this purpose, agreements with all the public universities of Barcelona have been signed to install the service in their campus and provide service to their community (135.000 students) with the objective to reach at least 20.000 users during the H2020 project.
Other partners that provide space are private companies such as Large Company complexes, Hospitals, Commercial Centres, Public Parkings,… which have been contacted to enlarge the network and offer more locations to the users of the service.
In the last year of the project, 2020, the pilot results will show how the uptake of the service by users has been, with 500 parking spots installed throughout the city of Barcelona. The future plans of Vadecity include the opening of 5 more cities in Spain within the next years, and international expansion in Europe and Latin America soon after.

Final results

\"Mobility of people is in a period of change. The information society has opened new opportunities to make transportation far more efficient and user-friendly.
New people transportation is assumed as a service now (Mobility as a Service) in front of previous conception of a product. Companies as Uber have fundamentally changed the way people search for, consume, and pay for transportation. Mobility is becoming much more tailored to what users want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Traditional transportation companies are changing to MaaS to bring what costumers ask for. The goal is to make it so convenient for users that they opt to change the way they commute, not because they’re forced to, but because the alternative is more appealing.
As a winner of the international tender \"\"Barcelona Open Challenge. Lot 1: Reducing bicycle thefts in the city \"\" with the Barcelona City Council, Vadecity has become a MaaS company and has already implemented a system of safe and smart parking for bicycles in the city of Barcelona.
Nowadays, developing the H2020 SME project SMART BIKING, the main goal for Vadecity is to assure an excellent development and implementation of the new platform to give an outstanding service to the different stakeholders – regular cyclists, public administration and private companies – in the current living lab of Barcelona.
With SMART BIKING project, Vadecity aims to promote the use of the bicycle as a transportation mode in the city, reducing costs, congestion, pollution, accident rate and sedentary lifestyle in the society.
Once Barcelona project will be self sustainable and consolidated, next challenge for Vadecity will be the internationalization of the service, replicating the model on those urban areas with the same characteristics.
In the future, Vadecity aims to become a reference operator for “MaaS last mille people mobility”, developing services for people, companies and vehicles with a role in this market as bikes, electric kickscooters, wheeled scooters,.
\"

Website & more info

More info: https://www.vadebikebcn.com/.