Itaú renews bicycle sponsorship for 10 years and plans to reach 20,000 bikes

by

Itaú renewed, for another ten years, its support for bicycle loan systems that bear the bank’s name and operate in ten cities, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Buenos Aires.

The institution does not reveal the amount invested, but says it will be enough to maintain and expand the fleet by 50% in the coming years. With this, the expectation is that the total number of bicycles will reach 20 thousand vehicles.

“We will have reinforcements in existing cities, to meet the pent-up demand, and we will also study expansion to other cities”, says Luciana Nicola, Institutional Relations manager at Itaú.

Thomas Martins, CEO of Tembici, the company that operates the services, says that the use of bikes has reached a historic high in the last two months, exceeding the number of trips before the pandemic, which generates the need to expand the fleet.

“Each bicycle makes between 6 and 8 trips a day, a high number all over the world. We have seen new occasions of use for leisure, mobility and deliveries”, he explains.

One of the issues is that the different uses sometimes overlap at the same time. In the early evening, for example, there is great demand to go from work to the subway station, for leisurely walks and also for food deliveries, given the increase in orders at dinner time.

The new investment will also be used to expand the offering of e-bikes, which help cyclists climb hills and travel longer distances with less effort. Currently, there are 700 models with an engine, 500 of them in Rio de Janeiro. Tembici expects to have more than 5,000 e-bikes in operation over the next five years.

In total, in the last ten years, 71 million trips were made by 3 million users. The company’s estimate is that 32 thousand tons of COtwo have ceased to be issued.

The project started in 2011, in Rio de Janeiro, with the name Bike Rio. The following year, he arrived in São Paulo as Bike Sampa. In the early years, bicycles were operated by the Serttel company.

In the following years, the system was taken to other cities and countries in Latin America. Today, the list includes, in addition to São Paulo and Rio, Recife, Olinda, Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Santiago (Chile), Buenos Aires and Nordelta (Argentina).

In 2017, there was a change of operator: Serttel left and Tembici entered. With the change, there was a reduction in the list of cities, and places like Belo Horizonte and Brasília no longer had orange bicycles. The name of the service was changed to Bike Itaú.

The cities that remained in the project had a fleet change: Tembici brought more modern and robust vehicles, manufactured by PBSC, the same supplier of systems for cities such as New York, Toronto and Washington.

Sponsorship of bicycle systems by banks also occurs in other cities around the world. The New York system is sponsored by Citibank and the London system is sponsored by Santander.

However, the expansion of the network in metropolises of developed countries is much faster. As a comparison: in São Paulo, the system was inaugurated in 2012 and today has 2,700 bicycles and 260 stations. New York’s Citi Bike, which started in 2013, currently has 24,000 bikes and plans to reach 40,000 by the end of 2024.

Itaú’s partnership models vary between cities, but the bank’s funds help to fund the operation of the systems. Another part of the resources comes from users, who can pay per trip or subscribe to daily, monthly or annual plans. In São Paulo, the monthly plan costs R$ 37.90 and includes 4 trips per day, of up to 45 minutes each. Prices vary by city.

Decisions on where to place the stations are taken jointly by local governments, Tembici and Itaú. One of the criticisms of the project is that it is still concentrated in the richest neighborhoods of the cities where it operates, with rare presences in more remote neighborhoods. Asked about this, Martins says that 70% of bicycle users do not live in the station area.

“It is not because we are in the central areas that we do not serve different audiences. The bicycle is the cheapest option for a person who comes from more remote areas to make the last part of the trip, such as taking the subway to work”, he ponders. “The stations with the highest number of loans are Central do Brasil, in Rio, and the Faria Lima subway, in São Paulo, and that’s been about five years”

Martins also says that the expansion needs to be done as a block, so that the new stations are close to the existing network, without creating isolated nuclei.

In previous years, the project carried out tests with loans and bike racks in suburban neighborhoods, such as Cidade Tiradentes, but the ideas did not advance. Currently, more studies are being carried out to understand how the demand for bicycles works in served neighborhoods, in order to generate data for governments and evaluate new initiatives, such as the creation of bicycle racks.


The Bike Itau

Sao Paulo

2,700 bikes, 260 stations

Rio de Janeiro

3,100 bikes, 310 stations

Recife, Olinda and Jaboatão dos Guararapes

900 bikes, 90 stations

Porto Alegre

410 bikes, 40 stations

Buenos Aires

3,200 bikes, 320 stations

Santiago (Chile)

2,500 bikes, 190 stations

Nordelta (Argentina)

200 bikes, 20 stations

Source: Bike Itaú

You May Also Like

Recommended for you