From today, holders of public transport coupons can rent a bike in Prague for free
Updates: 10/11/2021 10:40 AM
Released: 11.10.2021, 10:40
Prague – Holders of time coupons for Prague public transport can now borrow shared bicycles from Rekola and Nextbike for 15 minutes free of charge. Representatives of the municipality, providers and the organization Ropid, which takes care of Prague’s public transport, informed the journalists about it. The trial operation will last until the beginning of next year, after which the city will evaluate it and, if necessary, issue a tender for a permanent operator.
Holders of all time coupons can borrow the bike up to four times a day, but they must use the Lítačka mobile application, with the help of which the loan is made. “In particular, we want to improve and streamline the transport of citizens for the last mile or the last hundreds of meters from a metro station or tram stop,” said the mayor’s deputy for transport Adam Scheinherr (Prague Sobě).
The city will pay the operators 12 crowns for each loan, and has allocated 2.4 million crowns for the pilot project according to an earlier decision of the councilors. After their exhaustion, we operate and prepare a permanent solution. “I expect that sometime in the coming years, bikesharing operators would compete, who would be permanently involved in the public transport system,” said the deputy.
The deputy also said that in the last year, the city, in cooperation with a transport company and city districts, has installed bicycle stands at metro stations, but otherwise the distribution of bicycles is on the operators. According to him, the two providers involved in the pilot project are the only ones who signed up. “We still contacted Lime, who has e-bikes, but they didn’t want to cooperate with us and we didn’t want to involve scooters,” he explained.
The director of the city company ICT Operator Michal Fišer added that the Lítačka mobile application is now actively used by 200,000 to 250,000 users and about 700,000 people have been downloaded.
In Prague, they operate shared bicycles or e-bikes by Rekola, NextBike, Bolt, Lime or Homeport. In the last election period, Prague concluded a memorandum with the operators of shared means of transport. However, the municipality and the central city district criticize the company Lime, which operates shared electric scooters in the metropolis, which, according to them, do not sufficiently enforce the rules for storing carts and their movement on sidewalks. The current city management in 2019, a memorandum with the company helped you.
According to previous information, the municipality is preparing a new memorandum, which is to include both operators of shared bicycles and electric scooters. At the same time, city officials approved in June that Prague would propose a new law that would limit the speed of bicycles and electric scooters on sidewalks where they can ride, thanks to exceptions, to less than the current limit of 20 new per hour.