ATM: a challenging decade

The ATM (Autoritat del Transport Metropolità) is the solution that Barcelona and its metropolitan area have come up with in response to a problem that is common to all built-up urban areas – namely coordinating the urban and metropolitan mass transit systems and funding public transport.

ATM is a voluntary consortium formed by the civil administration authorities in charge of public transportation services in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The foundational agreement was signed in 1997 in fulfilment of a process that had lasted at least 15 years, during which the authorities and the citizenry progressively acquired awareness of the need for an agency of this type. The purpose of this article is to review the achievements of ATM over a span of time that allows us to reflect upon its trajectory.

Profile

The public authorities who constitute ATM are:

• The Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya)
• The Entitat Metropolitana del Transport (Metropolitan Transportation Council) formed by the Barcelona city council and those of the 18 towns that comprise its greater metropolitan area
• Other city councils in the metropolitan area that provide their own urban transportation services but are not included in the previous group (approximately 30)

The central government of Spain is not a member of ATM, although it does participate in an observer capacity in its Governing Board and Executive Committees.

The area for which ATM is responsible is Barcelona’s metropolitan region, which has a surface of roughly 3,200km2, with a coastline length of approximately 1,00km, a population close to 4.8 million inhabitants and is divided into 164 towns. The city of Barcelona itself occupies 100km2, just 3% of regional surface, and has a population of 1.6 million inhabitants.

There are four railway companies that operate in the Barcelona region, which are:

• The Metro which is operated by TMB (Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona), a public operator owned by the Entitat Metropolitana del Transport, who also runs the urban bus services
• Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC), a public company with a metropolitan network and some urban sections. Its ownership is in the hands of Generalitat de Catalunya
• Renfe, which is the Spanish public railways company
• Tramvia Metropolità, a new private operator running since 2004 that is responsible for the management of the new tramway system

Table 1 shows the technical details of the various railway networks within the Barcelona region.

In addition to the rail network operations there is another denser bus network that services shorter journeys and fulfils a structuring function in the areas where no railway services are available. There are approximately 40 bus companies, whose services can be grouped as follows:

• TMB bus services in the city of Barcelona and in a few of the neighbouring towns
• Other urban transportation services within the greater metropolitan area
• Metropolitan bus lines

A total of 934.8 million passengers were carried by the public transportation network in 2007, of which 578.9 were carried by TMB, both by its metro and bus companies, 117.1 million were carried by Renfe and 79.1 million by FGC.

Infrastructure Master Plan: drafting and execution

A major duty of ATM is drafting and approving the Infrastructure Master Plan. The current Plan was approved in 2002 and covers a period of 10 years. Execution of the plan is managed by the various public administration authorities with the Catalan government being the most prominent one. The attached map shows the stage of progress of the various projects at the end of 2007.

The most relevant operation up to date is the construction of the new tram network. We must also mention the building of the new L11 metro line and the two new interchanges at Quatre Camins and Martorell Central between the various rail and bus networks, as well as a new cable car line between Olesa and Esparreguera.

Three new metro sections that will extend the existing network are currently under construction, namely L2 (section Pep Ventura – Badalona Centre), L3 (section Canyelles – Trinitat Nova) and L5 (Horta – Vall d’Hebron), all of which will be inaugurated before 2010. In parallel, the FGC network is being extended into the Sabadell and Terrassa urban areas, both of which have more than 200,000 inhabitants.

However, the most important work enterprised in the frame of Barcelona’s Infrastructure Master Plan is the L9 metro line. It is a new line with a length of 46km and 53 stations, which has been totally awarded and about half of which is under construction. This line will cross the whole of the Barcelona urban area, servicing neighbourhoods that have been built up most recently and interlocking existing branches of the network, with the aim of improving its connectivity in general. The first sections of L9 will enter into operation by 2009.

The adaptation of all of the metro and FGC stations to persons with reduced mobility is being concluded successfully and this programme is expected to be finalised by 2010.

The cost of the Infrastructure Master Plan works that have awarded or are under construction amounts to €7,540.5 million overall.

The Infrastructure Master Plan is scheduled to be reviewed and redrafted at its half life. This job began a year ago and the new plan should be ready in 2009.

The new tramway network

Of the works carried out under the aforementioned Infrastructure Master Plan, the new tramway must be described expressly, as it is a new means of transport that has been reintroduced in Barcelona 33 years after having been phased out. Moreover, because Barcelona is a city that already has an extensive underground network, the tramway could not be thought of as a light metro or substitute for the underground system but viewed instead as a new means of transportation that needed to mesh with existing metro and bus lines.

From an institutional and contractual point of view as well, the tramway constitutes an innovative solution. It was devised as a BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) project and it has involved several contractors, transport operators and banking institutions. ATM was entrusted by its constitutional public administrations to award the project, to handle the construction project management and to manage all of its monitoring, supervision and financing.

The tramway consists of two separate networks; Trambaix and Trambesòs, that in the future will be connected across the city’s central area.

The tramway is of a modern design, with exclusive lanes along the whole route and traffic light priority at most intersections. Furthermore, construction of the tram network has offered an opportunity to modify street sections, providing more space for pedestrians, bicycle lanes and social life in general, to improve existing services such as the sewer system, lighting, etc. and to adapt sidewalks to persons with reduced mobility (in wheelchairs or pushing strollers or shopping carts, etc.). Grass borders the tram tracks, achieving a goal to increase green areas in a southern city, where greenery is always limited.

Trambaix and Trambesòs were inaugurated in 2004. Since then, the demand has increased year-after-year, even in those years when no new section has entered into service.

During a survey conducted in November 2004, 22.2% of the new tram passengers which used to make the same journey in the past, declared they were former car users, as either drivers or passengers.

The Mobility Master Plan

ATM recently completed the 2012 Mobility Master Plan (MMP) of the Barcelona metropolitan region. The plan, approved in July 2007, is based on an integrated approach for all transport means tackling both passengers and goods and aims at guaranteeing a high level of accessibility to citizens and reducing the environmental impacts of transport.

The Mobility Master Plan is a result of the National Mobility Directives, approved by the Generalitat de Catalunya in October 2006 and which are the guiding framework for the application of the pioneering 2003 Mobility Law.

According to the MMP, the following challenges must be achieved by 2012:

• Modal split must evolve in such a way that sustainable transport means support 2/3 of the total mobility in the region
• The total share of public transportation means has to jump 5% points by inducing people to switch from private cars to buses, metro, railways and trams
• Energy consumption per inhabitant linked to transportation activities needs to fall by more than 7.5 %
• CO2 emissions have to drop 20.5% and pollutant particles (PM10) by 48%
• Casualties should be 25% less than in 2005

To get these goals, the MMP anticipates 90 operations related to urban planning, mobility and transportation management, transport safety issues, new infrastructure, information and communication, new vehicles and on-demand services. In particular, the MMP proposes to reduce urban sprawl by modifying certain regulatory frameworks, to increase public transport patronage by 30%, to foster bicycle use and walking by building 150km of regional bicycle lanes, and to reduce car mobility by 13% through strengthening of the offer of car sharing and car pooling services and by giving advantages to buses such as dedicated busways and priority traffic lights. The plan also aims at reducing CO2, NOx and particle emissions by 2012 by promoting use of cleaner vehicles, reducing fossil fuel consumption and reducing the average maximum speed on metropolitan motorways.

Given that success of the MMP depends on the fact that all stakeholders are deeply involved in it, ATM has carried out an extensive consultation during the elaboration phase. More than 150 institutions with interests in mobility and 300 other individual consultants, mobility experts, university technicians, entrepreneurs and citizens have participated in the open sessions and work groups.

The implementation of the MMP means the transformation of the ATM, established as a public transport authority, into a holistic mobility management agency which deals with the transportation system in a comprehensive way.

Development of an integrated fare system

Integrated fare systems are probably the best examples of what can be achieved with the establishment of public transport authorities. ATM introduced an integrated fare system in the Barcelona metropolitan region in 2001 with the following guiding principles:

• All tickets, cards and passes are part of the system and ATM exercises authority over the fares
• The user must be able to transfer as many times as necessary without incurring an increase in the cost
• The higher the use, the lower the fare, in order to encourage user loyalty
• The fare also depends on the distance covered, according to a map of fare zones

The geographic area of application of this measure was the greater metropolitan region which was subdivided into six concentric rings around Zone 1. In addition, eight radial sectors based on poles or corridors were taken into account. The intersection of rings and corridors resulted in the establishment of 33 zones. This map allows the user to know how many zones will be crossed during his journey and consequently, what type of travel fare will be required to make it.

Travel cards in Zone 1 are valid for 1 hour and 15 minutes from the time they are first validated; during this time the system considers that various validations are a part of a single journey and does not make any extra charges to the user’s travel card. The time span increases by 15 minutes for each new zone that is crossed in a single journey. Several travel cards are available although the one most commonly used is the T-10 travel card, which allows 10 journeys of up to four stages each. The next most popular is the T-50/30, which allows 50 journeys during 30 consecutive days and the T-Mes, which allows an unlimited amount of journeys to be made during one month.

In the first year, fare integration brought about a 7% growth in public transport trips. From then on, the number of trips has increased by 155 million validations, approximately 20.5%. Integrated fares are what have made ATM popular among the larger public. A working group involving ATM and the transport operators is now developing a plan to introduce e-ticketing in replacement of the current magnetic strip card systems.

Funding

Last but not least, another mission of ATM is to provide the financial resources needed to finance the metropolitan public transportation system. On a contract basis, public administrations transfer economic resources to ATM which are delivered in turn to the operators. The system’s annual operating cost, excluding investment, is approximately €1 billion, i.e. slightly over €1 per journey. The income coverage rate from ticket sales is 45%.

Since 2003, ATM has also been in charge of procuring the new rolling stock for the metro network through operative renting. A total of 99 5-car trains have been contracted by ATM, of which 83 have been already delivered.

Concluding remarks

A challenging decade is gone and new challenges are coming up for ATM.

A few examples of them include the deployment of the 2012 Mobility Master Plan, the design and execution of the Infrastructure Master Plan (IMP), which will be in effect until 2018 and the extension of the tramway network. Introduction of e-ticketing in a fare integration system which is totally consolidated after seven years of existence will be also extremely challenging.