It is usually the RACC, through its foundation, which carries out mobility studies in Barcelona. But is not the case. Eixample Breathes and Catalonia Walks have been the promoters of the report developed here, an analysis of how motorcycles park in the city. They have observed more than 6,500 motorcycles throughout 30 kilometers of streetsand the conclusion leaves little room for debate: 85% of those parked on the curb they break the ordinancewhile the vast majority (close to 97%) of those who rest on the road They combine well with municipal regulations. There are other interesting facts, such as the fact that the sharing motorcycles They behave much better than people think. The promoters of the study estimate that Every day there are 90,000 badly parked motorcycles in the Catalan capital.
This newspaper carried out this same experiment last December. The results were very similar, with 90% of the motorcycles sighted misplaced. On that occasion, the analysis focused on the street of Balmes and in Diputació and Consell de Cent, between Passeig de Gràcia and Bailén. As it is a sidewalk of between three and six meters, motorcycles should park parallel to the roadbut almost all of them were (and are still there) in drums, something that is allowed for sidewalks of more than six meters. All this is happening in a city with 271,000 registered motorcycles and 77,899 parking spaces, so there are only street holes for 28.7% of the biker population in the event that they all decide to go out at the same time, something that has never happened, among other things, because many are car park stops or they cannot circulate because they do not have a place in the low emission zone.
260,000 m bitetwo
In the streets studied by Eixample Breathes and Catalonia Walks (about twenty people walking 25 sections of streets in five of the 10 districts) a badly parked motorcycle has been found every 7.9 meters. “Is a architectural barrier that prevents and limits the mobility of pedestrians, even on streets with a single platform with priority for those who walk”, the authors maintain. All these badly parked motorcycles occupy a space of almost 10,000 square meters. Extrapolating data to the whole of the city, come to the conclusion that in Barcelona there are nearly 90,000 badly parked parking spaces that bite into the public space a total of 260,000 square meters, or what is the same, the entire space of the new Plaza de las Glòries multiplied by two and a little more.
Another of the conclusions of the study allows us to reflect on the main virtue of the invention: the fact of being conceived as a door-to-door transport vehicle. In the vicinity of the badly parked motorcycles (within 100 meters at the most) 1,600 free spaces have been located to park correctly on the road. It is also noteworthy that they break a spear in favor of ‘sharing’, because if in the early stages of shared motorcycles it was common to find them parked in any way, their observation concludes that the majority of the 251 sighted are well placed on the street.
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For all these reasons, Eixample Respira and Catalunya Camina propose that the motorcycles begin to pay for parking in public spaces, in the same way that cars do with green and blue zones. Palma de Mallorca and Paris, remember, will get to it shortly. pose a initial rate 1.5 euros per day for motorcycles registered in the city and 4 euros for those coming from other municipalities. All this money, they maintain, should be invested in improvements in public transport and in pacification of streets. “A part, even, could go to the victims of traffic accidents,” they add. Regarding accidents, they also remember that motorcycles are involved in half of the accidents, and that 90% of those who died in 2022 were on a motorcycle.
They also claim more spaces on the road, the total abolition of parking on sidewalks, promoting active mobility and betting on electric bicycles. Or that there is more attention from the Urban Guardsince the number of daily fines for this concept does not reach 60 daily.