We are all pedestrians at one time or another. Whether you use public transport, go by car, motorbike, bicycle or scooter... at one time or another, we all walk the city's sidewalks. Starting from this obvious premise, the urban mobility plan approved by the Barcelona City Council in 2021 put the pedestrian at the center to ensure their safety and the comfort of walking through the streets of the city.
The objective seems unfulfilled according to the latest survey carried out by the RACC. Based on 2,000 surveys carried out in recent months, 72% of Barcelonans consider that it is less safe to walk on the sidewalks now than four years ago. Pedestrians and cyclists are the most critical groups interviewed in terms of the feeling of insecurity. More than three out of four of them consider that moving around the city has become a less safe experience than before. Those who go by motorcycle and car are also critical, but in a lower percentage. It is also considered more unsafe for the majority to walk down the street or take public transport at night or at dusk compared to four years ago. This is what 65% of those surveyed believe.
Those who move mainly by car and motorcycle are the ones who complain the least about safety, but at the same time are the toughest when asked about the existing congestion on the road. 80% of those surveyed consider that fluidity has worsened at the urban level, a percentage that drops to 61% if the focus is placed on the roundabouts, that place that paradoxically already exceeds the levels of traffic prior to the pandemic, while in the interior of the city, the figures for 2019 have not yet been recovered.
The outlook for the future is not very rosy either. 65% of citizens consider that congestion will worsen in the next four years. Users of polluting vehicles are once again the most distrustful four years from now, while more than half of those who ride scooters believe that the situation will get better. "The measures that are being taken in Barcelona congest traffic even more, so the municipal government should rethink its mobility strategy, with more realistic objectives and accompanied by an improvement in the metropolitan public transport network", pointed out the president of the RACC , Josep Mateu, during the presentation of the report.
The data and its interpretation did not sit well with the municipal government. The deputy mayor Janet Sanz accused the RACC of "going into a campaign" with the study. “We know that it represents respectable and legitimate interests, but specific interests”, said Sanz after defending that “Barcelona does not have to do less, it has to do more”.
Apart from the perception of victimization that was so disliked in Plaça Sant Jaume, the RACC survey provides some indicators that in a certain way even reinforce the Colau government to continue putting more impediments to the car. In the same report, more than half of those who travel by car or motorbike acknowledge that they have "a reasonable alternative to public transport" to get around, a percentage that rises to 60% in the purely urban area. Therefore, if they do not make a modal change and leave the car parked at home, it is not for lack of alternative, but because they do not want to. Or because they consider that they do not win in reliability.
"Public transport has become subsidized or directly free, and, even so, there has not been a massive modal change because the problem is reliability, and in this case they feel that private transport is more reliable", assesses Josep Mateu. The data from the weekday mobility survey prepared by the Autoritat del Transport Metropolità (ATM) point precisely to this question as a determining element, although another RACC study carried out a couple of years ago showed that eight out of ten drivers acknowledged not using public transport considering it "not pleasant".
This resistance to changing to a more sustainable means of transport, even if there is an alternative, explains for the RACC why the modal split has remained stable in recent years. All of this even with a certain increase in private vehicles, while public transport has gone down in percentage terms (while registering record figures in absolute numbers), and active mobility is clearly on the rise, which includes scooters .
Faced with this scenario, those responsible for the mobility club ask to quantify the motorized mobility of Barcelona and its metropolitan area, which has no alternative to private vehicles, in order to realistically analyze how many drivers can be forced to switch to public transport and how many of them really do not have no choice but to use the private vehicle to carry out their essential mobility.
In this sense, as a solution, the RACC calls for "improving the metropolitan public transport network to guarantee a punctual, reliable, optimal, multimodal, safe and connected quality service". One of the essential elements that they consider essential is improving the accessibility of metropolitan public transport stations, both on foot and by private vehicle, promoting park-and-ride parking at source, with combined rates for parking and public transport to make it attractive for the potential users.
