Micro mobility development and its challenges for Porto

Abstract

In the past years, people have become more and more aware of the climate change crisis and cities have become more crowded. Also fueled vehicle transportation has become much more expensive, inefficient and bothersome as fuel has become much more expensive as well as cars, roads used by cars have to be maintained more often and also air and sound pollution caused mostly by cars has changed the idea of transportation for the general public. 

To address that, governments and municipalities all over the world have been searching for solutions to give its citizens different possibilities to replace the car with other types of transportation, like giving more space to pedestrians, public transport or micro-mobility transportation. In this article, we will be focusing our attention to micro-mobility and especially to its situation in Porto as coming from other countries, we have been puzzled about the lack of bike lanes and friendliness of the city towards micro-mobility. Being ourselves mostly users of bikes in our home cities, we wanted to understand why micro-mobility wasn't developed as much in Porto as other cities in Europe or even like its neighboring cities like Aveiro. Apart from that, the societal benefits of increasing micro-mobility and its improvement on not only the economy of the city but also the quality of life of its citizens were highlighted by cities all over Europe and using them as an example would help Porto develop a secure and healthy urbanistic infrastructure that would very highly improve the city of Porto in all its senses.