No more car, make way for the bike!
In city centers, two wheels have filled the space in a few years.
This change has not escaped the notice of entrepreneurs.
The businessman Marc Simoncini had bet in 2019 on the rise of the electric bicycle.
Invited from Europe 1 on Friday morning, he unveils his vision of the urban areas of the future.
INTERVIEW
Since the multiple confinements linked to the coronavirus pandemic, bicycles have returned to the heart of French cities.
More and more city dwellers take it for short trips.
But is the bicycle the future of urban transport?
This is the bet of the entrepreneur Marc Simoncini, creator of the start-up Angel Bike.
He was the guest of Théo Maneval on Europe 1 Friday morning.
More thermal cars in the city center by 2025
Every morning get on your bike to get to work.
It is the daily life of many French people in town.
And that, Marc Simoncini understood it.
For him, there will be no more thermal cars in city centers by 2025 "or even faster than that".
"This is the bet we made three years ago," says the businessman.
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The idea of the two men intervenes in the heart of the capital.
"The quality of life that we support in cities is untenable. We worked in offices that were at an angle, there were traffic jams from morning to night, it was honking. One morning we said to ourselves that this it was not possible for the city to remain like that ", says Marc Simoncini.
Before prosecution: "So we bet on the fact that people were going to change their mode of transport and that the bicycle would become the preferred means of doing the 3km or 4km which separates home and work".
The bicycle 2.0
With his partner, Marc Simoncini is embarking on the 2.0 bicycle in 2019. The start-up Angel Bike sells electric bicycles filled with electronics with state-of-the-art anti-theft systems.
The next model still costs a small fortune: its price is 2,800 euros.
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And the stake is winning for the moment. Demand for electric bicycles has greatly increased since the start of the pandemic. In addition, cars have less and less their place in city centers. After Nantes, Chartres and even Grenoble, the capital will also reduce the speed of vehicle traffic in the center of Paris: a speed of 30km / h cannot be exceeded from this summer. The measure comforts the entrepreneur. He even wants all means of transport, cars and bicycles, to be limited to 30 km / h in the city. A cyclist cannot, for the moment, exceed 25 km / h.