About fifty euros a year for a bicycle every day: a new form of city mobility is born. The company Vaimoo is placing 80 electric bicycles in 20 stations scattered throughout the city of Asti. Everyone will be able to use them and it will neither be difficult nor too expensive.
The new bicycles, flaming red, are a bit reminiscent of a Ciao Piaggio of ancient memory. Robust, with thick tires and above all pedaling is assisted by an electric motor mounted between the handlebars and the front wheel. There’s a reason, if it’s right there: “We avoid wheelies”, explains Gaetano Sciacovelli, sales manager of Vaimoo, a company that rents bicycles from Bari throughout Europe and now also in the city thanks to a regional financing of 325 thousand euros: «Asti – comments Marco Gabusi, regional transport councilor – is the first Piedmontese provincial capital to use them”.
But how do you use these bikes? Simple: you download the Vaimoo Bike sharing Appregistration and subscription are done.
Are expected annual fees (50 euros), monthly (20 euros), weekly (10 euros), daily (2 euros) plus one euro for every half hour of use. «Those who have an ASP season ticket for public transport will pay only 5 percent of the chosen fee – explains the president of the city multiservices, Fabrizio Imerito – and will also have 125 half hours free».
On the app there is a map that allows you to see in real time where the bicycles are and also to book one directly online to avoid not finding any when you arrive at the chosen station.
To activate it, simply scan the QR code on the handlebars of your bicycle, click on «start ride» and get on the saddle. The final destination for parking the bicycle must necessarily be another station, otherwise the “ride” does not end and you continue to pay.
Once in the right place just click on «end of travel» and wait for confirmation. Mayor Maurizio Rasero, returning from a recent visit to Holland, has no doubts about the initiative: «Cyclists are the norm up there, they speed everywhere», he says.
A way of moving that traffic, smog and pollution make almost obligatory: «The direction we must take is – continues Rasero – integrated mobility between public transport and bike sharing that allows you to leave the car in the garage». It will be possible?
«Ours is not a city of cyclists – explains the Councilor for the Environment Luigi Giacomini – it is made up of ups and downs and people are used to going on foot when not by car: this it is a challenge that we hope to win.”
Vaimoo, which has hired three people to monitor the functionality of the vehicles, expects an average of one and a half trips per day for each bicycle. A van will drive between the stations to see if there are enough vehicles and the batteries are charged. If the bicycle doesn’t work or needs maintenance, it is loaded and taken to the workshop that the Bari company has just opened in Vicolo Bosia.
