Prague Re-Tenders Free Bikeshare Rides and Doubles the Daily Allowance to Four

Prague will keep offering free shared-bike rides to holders of a long-term public transport pass for another two years, and will roughly double the daily allowance. City councillors approved it at an extraordinary session and the city announced it in a press release, Zdopravy.cz reported on 27 August. The city hall will now put the provision out to tender; it currently works with Rekola and Nextbike.

What changes for riders

The benefit today gives holders of a long-term PID Lítačka travel coupon two free 15-minute rides a day. From next year, once a new version of the PID Lítačka app is in place, that becomes up to four a day, capped at ten a week.

The eligibility limits are inherited rather than set by the scheme: the minimum age of 18 comes from the operators' own terms, and the effective maximum of 65 comes from the conditions for obtaining a long-term PID coupon.

The scheme has run in its present form since 2022. Zdopravy.cz reports more than 3.6 million rides taken since it was introduced and roughly 100,000 users added.

Shared bikes have become an inseparable part of Prague transport and an excellent complement to public transport, which is confirmed by more than three and a half million rides taken. With the new contract we want not only to preserve this successful benefit but above all to move it to a higher level.

— Jaromír Beránek, deputy mayor for transport

The part that is about geography, not price

Beránek said a new system of coefficients will let the city support bikesharing specifically in the more peripheral parts of Prague, where both the density of the bike network and the frequency of public transport are lower.

That is the more consequential half of the contract. Dockless bikeshare concentrates itself where demand is thickest, which in Prague means the inner districts, and the outer estates that would benefit most from a first- and last-mile option are the ones least likely to have a bike outside. Paying per supported ride does nothing to change that on its own; weighting what the city pays by where the ride happens might.

The tender documents will also tighten how the distribution of supported rides across the week is defined.

How the contract is built

The procurement, called Bikesharing v PID Lítačka 2026, has an estimated value of CZK 50 million for approximately two years. The single award criterion is the lowest bid price for one supported 15-minute ride.

The city intends to contract up to three suppliers. The second and third-placed bidders will also be signed provided their price does not exceed the lowest bid by more than 25 per cent — a mechanism meant to preserve a competitive market after award rather than only during the tender, and at the same time to widen availability for users.

Participation also requires signing an open-house contract with Technická správa komunikací, the city's roads authority. That condition puts the operation of the service inside the rules for using public space, which is where the friction with dockless bikes usually shows up: not in the riding, but in where the bikes are left standing.