Focus on Barcelona, Spain !

Our blog posts series presents the different cities with which Qucit has partnered to offer mobility system optimization solutions. Discover how our solutions contribute to improving urban mobility in these areas! 

Thanks to its cultural capital and its Mediterranean climate, Barcelona is considered one of the most attractive cities in Europe. The second largest city in Spain and the Catalan capital is also a model to follow in terms of urban mobility planning. Since 2015, the City has decided to create “supermanzanas”: urban spaces of 400 m2, in which traffic, speed and car parking are reduced to a strict minimum. This measure aims to make public space more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. To further promote soft mobility, the City has built more than 200 km of cycle paths and established a bike sharing system: Bicing!

Since 2007, these self-service bikes, only available for residents, have been a real success. Three months after the inauguration, this service already had 50,000 users! Managed by the company Ferrovial, Barcelona's bike sharing system is now one of the largest in Europe with 7,000 bicycles spread over 519 stations. Barcelona has the particularity of being a very hilly city, so many users of the Bicing system take bicycles from the stations located on their height and return them to the coast. One of the main challenges for the operator is to ensure that those high stations are always supplied with vehicles. On the other hand, the stations close to the coast must always have places available to accommodate new bikes. This is how since 2020, through the Qucit Bike application, Qucit has supported Ferrovial in the management of its fleet by optimizing the rebalancing of these stations to regulate these asymmetrical flows! 

In addition, Qucit Bike User is also used by Ferrovial. Integrated into the Smov application and website, this software predicts the bike demand up to 24 hours in advance and provides reliable information on the availability of the station to users who wish to borrow or drop off a vehicle.

In our next post, we will discover the bike share system in Miami !