Nearly 40,000 people in Barcelona used their voting power in May 2021 to decide how to spend 30 million euros of the municipal budget and implement 76 investment projects around all districts. Now these projects are starting to become reality, with 21 to be implemented this year. One example is the bike lane in Ronda del Guinardó, one of the first citizen initiatives from the participatory budget to be completed.
Over 5,000 people in Horta-Guinardó voted to decide which projects they wanted to invest in with the 3.2 million euros allocated to the district as part of the participatory budget. From all the proposals made, seven projects were chosen. One of them is the bike lane now being inaugurated, which received over 1,400 votes.
The project to create the bike lane in Ronda del Guinardó involved an investment of 650,000 euros and was carried out in the section between the streets of Vinyals and Cartagena. The two-way bike lane was shifted off the pavement and onto the road surface, with two more segregated one-way lanes added to provide continuity for the existing bike lane in Ronda del Guinardó. The section therefore now consists of a bike lane, a bus lane and a traffic lane with a 30 km/h speed limit.
Twenty-one projects to be completed in 2022
This year should see the completion of 21 of the 76 projects chosen in the voting stage of the participatory budget. As with the bike lane in Ronda del Guinardó, some other projects have already been finished: the landscape renovation of the Torrent de Canyelles and the installation of adapted benches in the Porta neighbourhood.
The rest of the projects, many of which are already under way, will be completed as from January 2023. The updated status of all projects can be found on the citizen participation platform decidim.barcelona, whether in the city as a whole or district by district.