Rickshaw
The bicitaxi (also rickshaw, tricitaxi, pedicab or velotaxi) is a vehicle intended for the transport of passengers and built under the principle of the bicycle, powered by human traction, with a capacity of two seated adult passengers and their driver.
For obvious reasons, its scope is urban passenger transport, especially for tourist tours around the city.
Many pedicabs, especially in Asian cities like Shanghai and Beijing, are equipped with an electric motor, modernizing the rickshaw. In cities in the United States and Europe, they are used as tourist vehicles with pedal assistance, which never replaces the action of the driver's pedaling, but does help him at specific moments such as starting, after braking or when going up a slope.
Futuristic designs of the classic pedicab already exist. This alternative and ecological transport system can become a worldwide phenomenon that has already been implemented in cities such as Guadalajara, Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Malaga, Munich, Copenhagen, London, Vienna, Bogotá, Amsterdam, New York, Mexico, San Francisco, San Sebastián, Lima (unofficial) and Washington.
Dominique Lapierre's novel The City of Joy provides a detailed literary description of the life of Calcutta rickshaw drivers.
Bicitaxi in Mexico
Since the early 1990s, pedicabs began to provide transportation services in the historic center, and they moved throughout the City. Currently there are about 20,000 pedicabs and they have become popular because they are an alternative for transportation over short distances, they provide a door-to-door service and circulate in streets where motorized transport does not enter or in spaces that avoid intense traffic in congested areas; but, mainly, the rapid growth of the sector is due to the fact that the rickshaw represents a self-employment option, with low investment and does not require job qualifications.
As is well known by those who live in Mexico City, one of the most conflictive areas, in terms of transportation and mobilization, is the Historic Center of Mexico City. In this regard, the pedicabs, or pedicabs, have proven to be a good solution to get around within the first square of the city.
Bicitaxi in Cuba
As a result of the acute Cuban economic crisis, which began in the 1990s, the public transportation service was seriously affected, and it came to be partially supplied by animal-drawn vehicles (called "coches" or cativanas) and by the pedicabs, both handmade.
The latter were imposed more quickly and with varying degrees of acceptance in the cities of the interior of the country. Subsequently, there was an emigration to the provincial capitals, particularly to Havana, of rural pedicabs due to the resurgent private market and the influx of tourists who demand this type of mobility.