The life and history of Barcelona take place in its streets, and the way of traveling through them has helped to weave its identity and development. The noise of the electric trams that Andrea talked about in Nada, by Carmen Laforet, stopped being heard in the 1970s with the popularization of the private car. Later, the Olympic Games put the city back in front of the sea and opened rondas (ring roads) that reduced traffic in the center, untied other knots that were collapsing it and improved connectivity between neighborhoods. But despite the advances, the car remained at the center of mobility that now seeks to prioritize people and the environment, travel on foot or by bicycle and public transport. “Barcelona is a dense, very complex city, but the data tells us that we are starting from a fairly good situation,” explained Ricard Font, manager of the Mobility Area of the Barcelona City Council, in a meeting organized by EL PAÍS and Acciona in which four experts addressed the evolution and challenges of mobility in Barcelona. As an example, Font put some figures on the table: 85% of residents rely on so-called active mobility or public transportation to move within the city, the number of metro trips has doubled—from 600 to 1,200 million—in half a century and nearly 300 kilometers of bike lanes have been deployed. «These data are very important. And they are important because correct public policies have been made,» said Carme Miralles, professor of Urban Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “Those responsible for these public policies were right in thinking that Barcelona’s urban model had to go hand in hand with these active mobilities,” he added. You cannot change the way people move around the city without changing the way you conceive and plan it. “We have cities designed years ago exclusively from the private vehicle,” said Enric Batlle i Durany, landscape architect and founder of the Batlleiroig studio. “If we design for people and bicycles, many of the trips we sometimes take by car would be done on foot,” he added. Barcelona residents can travel on foot, by tram, by train, by metro, by bus, on their own bicycle or on an electric one from the public fleet, as well as on a shared electric motorcycle or car, or combine different means in the same journey. “I believe multimodality is the key to mobility in cities,” commented Cristina Martínez, financial director of Silence—the Acciona subsidiary that manufactures electric motorcycles and nano vehicles—, who highlighted the Catalan capital’s support for these clean energy vehicles with the installation of conventional charging points and battery exchange. Intermodality means taking multimodality one step further and allows the jump from one medium to another in a system in which they are integrated from an operational, tariff and physical point of view. “This intermodality of different networks and different means of transport, whether public or private, we would have to improve,” said Miralles about the exchange nodes.
Cars in the access
Although the car is not the main option for moving around Barcelona, it is, with a 60% preference, according to Font, when accessing the city from the other municipalities of the metropolitan area. «The problem is in the accesses to Barcelona, outside of roundabouts. And the problem is in how we have not attended to this communication for many years,» Font explained. “Today Rodalies transports about 350,000 passengers a day,” he noted about a commuter network that has not been expanded since 1975. And intercity buses do the same with more than 450,000. “This is where we have the most important challenge,” said the manager of the Mobility Area of the Barcelona City Council, who highlighted the importance of achieving effective intermodality between urban and interurban infrastructures and systems. The real city, as Batlle called it, goes beyond the municipal limits of Barcelona. “It is not just enough for some to live well, everyone must live well,” said the expert. The mobility of today and tomorrow has to make its way into yesterday’s urban planning, with cities designed and organized around the car. “In the eighties and nineties, when we started designing and Barcelona was the capital of design, they wanted the metro stop to disappear,” Batlle recalled. Now, he assured, he realizes that they were wrong and that mobility must be the central axis of urban development. Cities, their populations and the way they are planned evolve over time and solutions that were adopted—even successfully—years ago may not respond to current needs or objectives. Batlle considers, for example, that there are many park-and-ride parks, spaces around the stations where you leave your car to continue the journey on public transport. «We are improving and at the same time we are creating new problems, but the city is like that. The city is also conflict, it is also problems, it is also those dysfunctions,» Miralles noted. The expert explained that the spaces occupied by these parking lots are the most accessible and that it may be more profitable to dedicate them to schools, workplaces or residences. “We are seeing park and ride in a different way than we did 20 years ago,” he noted. Although most trends promote other means of transportation over the private vehicle, Martínez pointed to its adaptation to the city: «That it is a clean vehicle, that it is electric and that also takes up little space.» Added to the five million inhabitants of the metropolitan region are the tourists who visit the city every year, some 16 million in 2025, and who add pressure on transportation and public space. Most of the speakers referred to the management and organization of these flows of travelers, to prioritizing, redirecting and establishing rules, for example, on coach access to points of interest or financial compensation for the use of a system that, according to Font, is 75% subsidized with public money. Miralles also raised the possibility of limiting it. «Nothing is unlimited and neither is tourism, how much tourism does Barcelona admit? I think it is an interesting debate that points to this limitation,» he said. “Many cities are raising these three elements: accept, manage and limit.”
