Budapest, the new cycling city
Posted by Ágnes Taraszovics · Mar 18, 2014

What do you do when you want to get easily and quickly for example from Deák Square to Heroes' Square? So far you could choose between the subway and the bus, but this will soon be over. Thank God, because how can you see the city from underground or inside a crowded bus? Beyond local residents’ everyday needs, Budapest Bicycle “Bubi” Sponsored by MOL (Hungarian Oil and Gas Company) provides a solution for this too.

Despite the fun sounding name, Bubi (pronounced boo-bie) is none other than the Hungarian capital’s new public bike-sharing system. In April this year, after several years of preparation, Budapest joins the club of metropolises with public bikes.

This public bike-sharing system may already be familiar from other European and overseas cities. The idea and realization are similar to those: riding a bike is quick, convenient and above all healthy. It is good for relatively short distances, when it is often difficult to take public transport, or walking may be too slow. Also last years have shown there is a great demand in Budapest for appropriate cycling possibilities.

From April anyone can use Bubi who register themselves beforehand. The registered MOL Bubi members and all other occasional registrants can use the bikes 24 hours a day, seven days a week, throughout the whole year. Like the foreign counterparts, Bubi stations will contain docking system and an information interface, where the payment can be arranged. The bicycles can be used free of charge for half an hour, the next 60 minutes will cost the price of a single transport ticket (now HUF 350), the following 60 minutes the price of two single tickets, and so on. The rental fee is to be paid afterwards by credit card or a special prepaid chip card. The terminal will perform the identification of the user, and will be able to tell how many bikes and how many docking stations are available at each service point. This information will also be accessible on the Internet and via smartphone applications. To eliminate the stations become full, the designers constructed 40% higher system capacity than the number of bicycles. Bubi will have a central system keeping track of the bikes, the docking stations as well as payment transactions.

The planned scheme in Budapest is equal to the size of the system in Vienna and Stockholm, however, will be far below the number of bicycles in Paris (20600), London (8000), Barcelona (6000), Brussels (6000) or Washington DC (1900). The Bubi system will start with 75 docking stations and 1100 bicycles, that may be picked up and drop off at any of the stations. 57 stations will be located on the Pest side, 17 in Buda, and one on Margitsziget (Margaret Island), as can be seen on the following map.

Although some might say biking in Budapest is dangerous, car drivers are too aggressive, so public bike-sharing cannot be popular, Budapest is becoming a safer cycling city after all. Recent years have shown that car drivers are respecting cyclists more and more. They are expecting that once a car driver will try Bubi, they will be even more tolerant and accept cyclists as part of the traffic.

Besides, the Bubi project is not only about bikes available to the public, but also about the cycling road network in Budapest. Within the Bubi service area, the overall traffic order has been reviewed: new bike lanes have been built, bike icons were painted on the streets and one-way streets have been made bidirectional for cyclists in addition to the recent developments in order to make Budapest bike-friendly.

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