A professional bike rental system should be the flagship of Regensburg.
But now the project, which has been planned since 2015, has apparently failed due to the costs.
Regensburg - The city of Regensburg needs a bike rental system. This is what it says in a decision of principle that the city council passed back in 2015. 600 bicycles, half of them pedelecs, should be there within the first five years, including several rental stations in the city area. The new town hall coalition under the leadership of Mayor Gertrud Maltz-Schwarzfischer then wrote a quick implementation of the topic on the agenda in 2020. According to the government agreement between the SPD, CSU, Free Voters, FDP and CSB, the distribution system should now be implemented “promptly and across the board”. Stadtwerk, a 100 percent subsidiary of the city of Regensburg *, was entrusted with a tender. And a provider has recently been found. But the system will probably not be implemented in the foreseeable future.
Distribution system for Regensburg: "There is a need for political coordination"
Stadtwerk spokesman Martin Gottschalk expresses it diplomatically.
Everything has been prepared as requested by the city council.
Now there is still a "need for political coordination".
"To what extent this ultimately has an influence on the commissioning that has been carried out, we cannot say." CSU parliamentary group leader Jürgen Eberwein, however, becomes clearer.
The current offer is "unacceptable from our point of view," he informs our editorial team.
Other representatives of the coalition have made similar statements.
Background: When it was first awarded, a Regensburg entrepreneur was awarded the contract.
According to reports, he estimated an amount of around five million euros for the required scope of services for the first five years - a sum that has since been considered the coalition's “pain threshold”.
But a competitor successfully sued this award and got a chance himself.
But its offer was, according to coalition circles, significantly more expensive - now they were talking about eight to nine million euros.
The coalition agrees that it is too expensive.
"As desirable as a rental system is, unfortunately we have to pay more attention to solidity financially than before the pandemic," says Horst Meierhofer (FDP), for example.
The distribution system for Regensburg was the reason for the award
Even improvements made by the applicant who was awarded the contract do not change anything. In the meantime, there should be an offer on the table that complies with the “pain threshold” of five million euros, but with significant reductions in the scope of services. Unofficially, the coalition has apparently already buried the project in view of this - at least for the time being.
The Greens in particular, but also regional representatives of the Verkehrsclub Deutschland and the ADFC (General German Bicycle Club), are sharply critical of this.
The award of Regensburg as bike-friendly, combined with a corresponding funding decision from the Federal Ministry for Environmental Protection in 2019, highlighted the importance of the bike rental system for the city of Regensburg as a forward-looking, bike-friendly municipality, says, for example, Greens parliamentary group spokeswoman Maria Simon.
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She and her group colleagues continue to insist on implementation and already wrote an open letter to the mayor on the subject in July.
But a meaningful answer is still pending.
Likewise an official political decision with which the bicycle system - and it can be assumed - will be buried for the time being.
* Merkur.de / bayern is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA
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