City Lab Barcelona

Urban on-street bike parking might have been an afterthought in the past, but increasingly cities will need better data on who, when and how residents are using on-street bike parking facilities. Which neighbourhoods are at capacity? Which areas need more facilities? What is the temporal dynamics and diurnal-noctural fluctuations? Where are the conflicts between pedestrians and illegally parked bicycles? Where are spots occupied by private bike-share programs? What about scooters? Or abandoned bikes? And what about kid bikes? How present are they in the urban cycling mix? And on average, how long do bikes stay in the on-street spots? Are they for day use? night use? or long term use? In this post I present some preliminary data with research conducted with Sofie Dejaegher, Esteve Corbera and Victoria Ortega, on urban on-street bike parking in Barcelona, with data collected between February and July 2021. Our journal article will come out later, but here are a few illustrative figures ...

  The CICLOBCN21 Conference brought together cycling organizations, activists, city policy makers, transportation wonks, academics, and cycling entrepreneurs on 7-9 October 2021 in Barcelona. As one of the largest cycling conferences in the Iberian Peninsula, it attracts cycling experts from Spain and Portugal. It felt wonderful to participate in an in-person conference again, to chat face-to-face and meet new people. For me it served as an introduction to the cycling community in Barcelona (and beyond), on a topic where I expect to be conducting research in the years ahead.   Here are my personal take-aways from the CICLOBCN21 conference:    *Cycling policy is activist driven. That is, a small group of committed and knowledgeable individuals have been pushing for change, and in most instances, the policy transformations are in response to organized pressure. My sense is that success is the result of close collaboration between the cycling experts and the adm...