Subscription
To use the system you must become a member. Subscription to the system is possible through the Bicing website (www.bicing.com), or through visiting the service office. The provision of a credit card number is necessary. It takes ten days to receive your card.
The Bicing member cards are only sent to addresses in Catalonia in an attempt to prevent tourists from using the system. This limitation was imposed upon the City Council by pre-existing local bike hire companies (grouped under Bicitours) that feared what they called illicit competition from the Bicing system. Bicitours and City Council agreed as well in enforcing a user block of ten minutes to change bikes (that is, when docking a bike, the user is blocked for ten minutes before being able to leave with another bike). As a result tourists are barred from using what is officially denominated a "public transport system" - a bit like barring tourists from using the metro or buses.
Read more about this topic: Bicing
Famous quotes containing the word subscription:
“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)