Cascais City Council is now offering 30 free minutes a day on Bird electric bikes to residents, students and workers in the municipality. Lisbon promised to include scooters in the pass, but the measure has yet to be implemented.
After setting aside its own bike-sharing system, The Cascais City Council has teamed up with Bird to offer a benefit to all residents, students and workers in the municipality: a free ride of up to 30 minutes on Bird electric bikes (scooters are not covered).
To access the benefit, you need to have the Viver Cascais card. This card is available to all residents, students and workers in the municipality, can be ordered free of charge online, It is the means that the municipality uses to provide local benefits. Once you have this card, all you have to do is open the Bird app and do scroll down until you find a card about Viver Cascais. Click on it and link your Viver Cascais account to your Bird account - the e-mail address must be the same. Note that the Viver Cascais card will only appear within the municipality of Cascais.
And... that's it. From here, you have access to a daily ride on a Bird bike of up to 30 minutes. This free time is only valid on the first trip of each day and exclusively within the boundaries of the municipality. It is not cumulative: if the journey lasts less than 30 minutes, the unused time is not carried over. After the free period, the tariff set by the operator applies.
According to the Cascais City Council, this initiative “integrates the municipal sustainable mobility strategy and encourages decarbonization through shared transport options” e “reinforces Cascais” commitment to active, accessible and environmentally friendly mobility, reinforcing complementarity with the MobiCascais system, already in operation".
An important note: for minors, activation is pending until approved in person by the parent or guardian, who must go to a MobiCascais service desk - the same procedure as for access to municipal public transport.
Lisbon promised but did not implement
The Lisbon City Council announced in June that residents of the municipality with a Navegante pass could use shared scooters for free as of September. The announcement was made after the signing of an addendum to the contract with the scooter operators operating in Lisbon, signed in January 2023, establishing new rules for use and circulation.
According to the municipality, the free service for Navegante pass users follows the model of the GIRA bicycle network and free access to parking lots. The idea, according to Vice-President Filipe Anacoreta Correia, was to encourage Lisboners to leave their cars behind, making the Navegante pass a satisfactory alternative in terms of urban mobility.
However, the technical implementation of the measure should take up to two months, since it requires integration between the technological systems of the scooter operators - Bird, Lime, Bolt - and the system of Transportes Metropolitanos de Lisboa (TML), which manages Navegante. In other words, the measure shouldn't have been ready until September. That didn't happen.
LPP has already questioned Lisbon City Council about this situation and will update this article as soon as it has news. When this integration is available, Lisbon residents with a Navegante pass will have to associate their Navegante pass with the scooter app they use or want to use.
