Smart Transportation in Barcelona

Barcelona is an early smart city, and it has also been successful in the development of smart transportation. As early as 2000, Barcelona was committed to promoting low-carbon and green environmental development policies. First, it supported the use of solar energy by residents of the city, and then popularized the use of various electric vehicles throughout the city, and built a large number of electric vehicle charging equipment in the city. In 2009, the concept of "smart world" became popular all over the world. Barcelona also proposed the concept of building a "smart city" model, which aims to improve the welfare and quality of life of citizens, promote economic progress, and ensure that cities are more efficient and sustainable development.

In the process of building a smart city, in order to make Barcelona more intelligent, the city chose an open platform, aiming to accelerate the development of future developers of sensors, networks, maps and software analysis, etc., to use the platform's data for their use. The platform also allows various city government departments to share information and avoid duplicating each other's work. For example, drivers only need to download a special application program, and then they can know the information of vacant parking spaces according to the information sent by the data platform, which is convenient for drivers to park safely and conveniently, and prevents time wastage. Similarly, both citizens and tourists can find the nearest bus stop, geographic location, and tourist location based on visualized map data and interactive browsing.

In addition, in order to develop green and smart transportation, Barcelona vigorously promotes the use of electric vehicles, deploys charging stations throughout the city, and green transportation-related facilities and services such as electric vehicle fleets and car rentals. By 2012, the city had more than 500 hybrid taxis, 294 public electric vehicles, 262 charging stations, 130 electric motorcycles and about 400 private electric cars. Barcelona Metropolitan Transport (TMB) also introduces an innovative orthogonal bus network (horizontal, vertical and diagonal) using hybrid buses. The introduction of this system has made buses faster, more frequent and easier to use.