Barcelona is the large Spanish city where more people, in proportional terms, travel to work or study centers by public transport or on foot. Or, to put it another way, where the car is used less for obligatory daily trips. This is what a comparative report on mobility in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Seville and Málaga prepared by the City Council of the Catalan capital based on data from the Survey of Essential Characteristics of the Population and Housing ( Ecepov) that the National Institute of Statistics (INE) has recently made public.
The report points out that in Barcelona only one in four people (24%) use a private car to go to work, a much lower percentage than that recorded in Madrid (43%) and at a huge distance from the main Andalusian cities . In Málaga, the daily use of the car represents 56% of work and study journeys, while in Seville it represents 53%.
The municipal technicians who have drawn up this comparative study point to several explanations for these great differences: from Barcelona's greater urban density to the availability of public transport or the effect of restrictive traffic policies through the application of the low-emission zone or the conversion into a street pedestrian zone. The authors of the report point out that "certainly the explanation for this great difference between the data for Barcelona and the other large cities is a combination of all these causes", and add that "in any case they indicate that the mobility of Barcelona is moving towards a multimodal model in which sustainable mobility is gaining weight compared to the car".
The INE data that serves as the basis for this Barcelona City Council report refers to the daily mobility uses of people over the age of 16. The survey points out which cities have a better share of sustainable mobility, that is to say, the cities where public transport is used more and where more people travel on foot. In this mode, Barcelona is once again positioned as the large Spanish city with the best mode of sustainable travel. According to INE data, in the Catalan capital 57% of people choose to travel by public transport or on foot. This percentage is lower in Madrid (54%) and Zaragoza (47%) and falls to 35% in Malaga.
The report states that to complete the data on the modal share, the percentage of people who use bicycles to travel should be included. However, the INE survey does not break down the data at this level and includes in trips "with other types of vehicles" the bicycle and personal mobility vehicles such as electric scooters, but also the motorcycle, which in Barcelona has a much higher presence than the other cities. In this case, citizens who travel to work or study with "another type of vehicle" in Barcelona are around 19%.
The data from the National Institute of Statistics selected by Barcelona City Council analysts also allow urban mobility to be broken down by sex and age to calibrate the profile of users of each mode. The most obvious conclusion is that there is a clear correspondence between the use of public transport and these two variables. Thus, it is observed that in Barcelona 54% of young people (category that includes people aged between 16 and 30) use public transport on a regular basis to go to work or study. This percentage drops 18 points, up to 36%, in people over 50 years old. If the age groups are compared with respect to the use of the car, a similar difference is observed, since only 10% of young people use this mode of transport for daily trips compared to 32% of people over 50 years.
People's daily mobility uses also seem conditioned by sex. In Barcelona, women use public transport much more than men. The difference is almost 20 percentage points, from 50% in the case of women to 31% among men. And as with age, there are also very noticeable differences in this section: women use the car for daily trips in 18% of cases compared to 32% of men.
