Overview
- City leaders will let the licences for roughly 3,500 private, minute-based shared bikes lapse at the end of their term rather than renew them, effectively removing those fleets from the streets.
- The municipality cites about 5,500 sanctions issued since January 2025 and citywide problems with poorly parked and misused bikes as the main reasons for the decision.
- Most current operators are international firms such as Smart Cycles, Ridemovi, Cooltra, Boltest, Lime, Bird and Voi, each holding large blocks of licences that the city says will not be renewed.
- Officials plan to boost the public Bicing system as the primary alternative, but recent complaints about broken anchors, defective bikes and station maintenance raise near-term concerns about Bicing’s capacity to absorb extra users.
- The private scheme grew from a contested 2020 tender that produced a fragmented rollout and operator withdrawals, and the non-renewal is an administrative, end-of-term step that may prompt legal and operational negotiations before equipment is removed.