The Barcelona bike bus grows, and not only in the number of ‘lines’ and schools involved. Also dares with the daily rhythm. The Sant Antoni bikebus (Eixample) launches and announces new departures from monday to thursday so that fathers, mothers and children go to school pedaling in a group.
In a Telegram message, the driving group has asked for adult volunteers to accompany the expeditions, since they always try to have older people in front, behind and on the sides of the platoon. Although the Guàrdia Urbana accompanies these groups from a distance and rearranges the traffic as it passes, the bicycle buses as a precaution place the children in the center to avoid incidents and confusion.
The new route will come out every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 8:35 a.m. in Plaza Conxa Pérez, located at the intersection of Borrell and Tamarit streets. The first day will be Thursday, October 13. It will go up through Calàbria to Provença and will end the route in the Model, where the parking lot and destination school are.
Exponential growth
As EL PERIÓDICO reported this September, the bicycle bus has started the 2021-2022 school year with a desire to grow. Only a year and a half after the premiere of the first line by the Santa Isabel de Sarrià school, a new season opens with 11 different routes that leave mostly on Fridays. They add about 700 regular participants and circulate through half of the city’s districts.
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The Sant Antoni line had already advanced that it was studying going out more than one day a week, as the Sarrià line already did at the end of last year and will continue now (Mondays and Fridays). Premieres are also predicted, for example in Fort Pienc or in Francesc Macià.
Bikebus representatives met with the leadership of the City Council –the mayor Ada Colau and the lieutenants Janet Sanz, Albert Batlle and Laia Bonet, as well as senior technicians– a month ago in the first edition of the roundtable on school mobility by bike, that I had ordered in June. They agreed to create a unified protocol for all the bike buses in Barcelona, instead of processing each permit separately in their district. Homework for this course that becomes even more necessary as this initiative grows.