Author: Alejandro Martín Barraza, Bid Manager and Urban Planner at Inurba Mobility
People who travel across a metropolitan area are people travelling to work, university, railway stations or wherever it is they need to go. They are not people thinking about municipal boundaries.
Yet, when someone takes a shared bike in Europe, they’re often required to switch bikes and systems entirely because of invisible borders where the system ends.
Established bike share is entering a new, more mature phase where fleets are being renewed often with electric assistance and much expanded coverage. E-bikes make longer journeys more practical but governance has not always kept pace.
At Inurba Mobility, our operations across Europe have prompted a question closer to our home in Spain: as Spanish cities and authorities pursue bike share expansion through different institutional and contractual routes, how can lessons from Europe support the nation’s systems to grow beyond municipal boundaries?
Upcoming renewals offer a chance to consider those choices before another generation of contracts is signed. That’s why we commissioned the Urban Cycling Institute to investigate metropolitan bike sharing governance and sit down with the people managing it.
Our aim was to bring European experience into the Spanish debate and, to me, the conclusion of the research is clear: we need to talk more about who organises bike share services in the first place.
Different models, one common thread
Paris is a good starting point to demonstrate how to tackle the challenge of fragmented bike share.
The French capital used the contract renewal behind Vélib’ Métropole in 2018 to change not only the operator but the contracting authority – from the city to a metropolitan joint authority, now AGEMOB. Renewal became an opportunity to reorganise responsibilities, not just replace bikes.
MEVO, which we operate around Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot in Poland, serves seventeen municipalities through a contract managed by OMGGS. This metropolitan body is not a transport authority. Instead, it chooses to take responsibility. Smaller municipalities gain access to a network they would struggle to build alone, with provision for others to join.
Helsinki and Espoo, where we also operate in Finland, share a service and brand despite separate city contracts. The UCI study highlights the coordinating role of regional transport authority HSL, clear responsibilities and regular dialogue between cities, operators and sponsors.
In the public tender process currently being conducted by the transport operator Kaupunkiliikenne, it was decided to adopt a joint procurement approach in order to extend the service to more than one municipality.
In the Copenhagen Region, we learned that legal barriers limited public transport operators’ involvement in bike sharing, so the region stepped in to fund a pilot. But keeping the service running required local councils to contribute their own money. The lesson is straightforward: regional leadership can launch a project but sustaining it requires local authorities to take responsibility for funding it. The next contract aims to secure that stronger municipal commitment.
VRNrad and Metropolradruhr in Germany also demonstrate the value of a shared regional framework. In both cases, it is a metropolitan transport authority that oversees the service, logically integrating it with the dynamics of local transport, even crossing borders between German states and resolving the issue of territorial coherence that we see in other regions.
There is no single formula to import. The common thread is that someone at metropolitan scale took responsibility. Contracts, funding and decision-making arrangements followed. That order matters.
Spain needs a framework, not a uniform solution
Spain is not starting from scratch. Four territories already illustrate different approaches to the same challenge, showing different results.
In the north, Bizkaia’s provincial system recently expanded without integrating with BilbaoBizi. Meanwhile, Pamplona is proposing a framework agreement with procurement initially by the city with a future transfer to the intermunicipal authority and successive expansions. Valladolid extends BIKI through agreements with neighbouring municipalities.
Barcelona makes the fragmentation most visible. Bicing and AMBici serve a continuous urban area but do not form a continuous operational network. Moving between them means changing bikes during one journey.
Of course, local and metropolitan authorities are well aware of this limitation. What remains unresolved is how to overcome it in the new scenario that is about to unfold with Bicing 3.0. Who integrates whom? With what responsibilities and under what conditions?
We cannot speak here of a failure of integration but rather of the point at which this debate has become particularly explicit. With Bicing 3.0 on the horizon, one of the questions that interests me most – not only as an operator, but also as a user – is to know under what governance model the service will be contracted and how it will relate to the wider metropolitan area.
None of these approaches are automatically right or wrong. The European examples matter because they show that different institutions can take responsibility, provided their mandate and the contractual framework support metropolitan coordination.
Spain does not need an identical model everywhere. It does need to stop treating metropolitan expansion as a problem to solve after the contract has been awarded.
The next tender is a chance to think bigger
Spain already has institutions experienced in coordinating services across municipalities. Before creating another organisation, we should ask which existing body can take responsibility and what mandate, resources and agreements it needs. Conditions for other municipalities to join must be considered from the outset.
And rather than focusing exclusively on the challenges of integration, it’s worth highlighting the benefits for users and local areas in terms of achieving their mobility objectives: a simple pricing structure, a single app and a bike that can be hired and returned within a well-organised network.
Metropolitan coverage is not limited to the longest journeys. We mustn’t forget the enormous permeability of the bicycle as a mode of transport which facilitates better connections and helps to spread demand. When combined with train, underground and bus stations, bike share can make the current public transport system more useful.
An operator runs the service it is given. We can improve availability, maintenance and redistribution but we cannot independently resolve a contractual boundary between systems. And we do care because our industry needs these services to work well. A well-designed network supports a region’s mobility objectives. A poor one can undermine confidence in bike sharing for years. This matters beyond who wins a particular tender.
For Spain, the opportunity does not simply lie in copying what has worked elsewhere. It is about taking advantage of the forthcoming renewals to decide how its own systems should evolve and to recognise public bike sharing as an established mode of transport and part of the mobility options available across large areas.
Barcelona is one such opportunity. Cities such as Seville and Valencia will face similar questions if they seek metropolitan expansion. Missing these opportunities means committing to years of services that do not fit together.
