Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

The Full Council has given the green light to the Urban Mobility Plan 2024 (PMU), the roadmap for mobility in the city aimed at achieving a safer, healthier, more equal and sustainable Barcelona. The document fully or partially takes on board 84% of the demands and suggestions put forward by various city organisations during the process started last year to revise the text.

Specifically, the PMU has introduced changes and improvements responding to 374 of the 444 demands received, some 84% of the total. In contrast, seventy proposals (16%) were disregarded as incompatible with the strategic goals of the plan or for overstepping its scope or its sphere of responsibility.

The document was backed up by favourable reports from the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM) and the Government of Catalonia.

The plan, which includes 62 lines of action and over 300 measures, has the aim of 81.52% of all journeys in 2024 being made on foot, on public transport or by bike.

Listening to all voices

During the process to revise the plan, amendments were introduced to take on board the various sensitivities voiced. The main changes relate to mobility in the following forms:

• On foot:

Strengthening the goals of reducing accidents, emphasising everyday mobility from the gender perspective and improvements to traffic lights specific to pedestrians, particularly in places where they have priority.

• On public transport:

Stronger collaboration with other administrations to drive infrastructures to connect and improve intermunicipal public transport; improvements to complementary public transport and routes making up the bus network and the definition of new accessibility goals at public transport stops.

• By bicycle and other personal mobility apparatus:

Improvements to specific traffic lights for cyclists; promotion of shared mobility with a metropolitan vision; better articulation of the city’s cyclable network with inter-municipal routes and better management of safe parking.

• In private vehicles:

Completion of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) and full implementation of 30 km/h speed limits in the city; proposal to study the implementation of other high impact environmental measures to complement the LEZ; align measures relating to parking with the city’s strategy in this area and improvements in measures to drive modal changes towards public transport.

The revised document also includes measures on smart mobility, such as boosting ways to promote vehicle sharing and better data management, plus changes in the sphere of urban goods distribution.

Guaranteeing the mobility of the future

The PMU is the roadmap which seeks to guarantee the universal right to mobility in the city, geared towards healthy and sustainable forms of transport such as journeys on foot, on public transport, by bike/PMV or clean vehicles.

The plan works in five main areas: safe mobility, sustainable mobility, healthy mobility, equal mobility and smart mobility, through 62 lines of action and over 300 specific measures.

To achieve safer and more sustainable mobility, the plan aims to increase the volume of journeys made on foot by 7.5%, those on public transport by 15.7% and those by bike by 129.4%. At the same time, the goal is to reduce journeys made with private vehicles by 25.6% compared to 2018. This would mean 81.52% of journeys are made on foot, on public transport or by bike.

See the full document here: https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/documentacio/pmu_bcn_2024_per_ceuim_20201214_compressed.pdf