Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona
About
Snapshot of all non-tourist scheduled public transport within the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB). Only services between stops within AMB’s administrative boundaries are included. AMB includes the core of the Barcelona conurbation (that built on the coastal plain), plus the southern-most part of the Vallès (the valley immediately north of the Catalan coastal hills), but does not include some of the largest towns in the Vallès (notably Martorell and Sabadell). The snapshot period is the week starting 26 November 2018 - the first week of operation for Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona’s (TMB) complete “horizontal and vertical” bus network. The snapshot also contains 2018’s new “AMB Exprés” network of limited stop bus services, plus metro Line 10 as far as Foc.
The dataset is an amalgam of GTFS data from the two large public agencies that manage local bus concessions (AMB and Generalitat de Catalunya), municipal bus/metro operator TMB, national railway operator Renfe, autonomous community railway operator Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC), and tram operator Tramvia Metropolità SA (TRAM), plus a hand-crafted network for bus operator Bus Nou Barris (a TMB concession that neither TMB, nor TMB’s owner AMB, include within their data).
Among Barcelona’s urban operators, service patterns are remarkably consistent throughout the day: Baixbus, TMB and TUSGSAL (the three largest bus operators) run almost exactly the same number of buses each hour between 08:00 and 20:00. The only significant variations in service are between weekdays and weekends - especially Sunday, which only offers about 40% of the (bus) service level of a weekday. A completely different “Nitbus” bus network operates overnight (roughly between 22:00 and 06:00), which has been separately filtered (defined as routes prefixed “N”). The overlaps between the day-time and night-time networks are few: Most obviously TMB’s metro, which continues to operate after midnight at weekends (journey opportunities which are counted as a part of the regular metro service).
Caution: The Barcelona public transport network rarely changes from week-to-week, and only selectively changes from year-to-year, so long after December 2018 this network snapshot is likely to look similar to some future network. However, such a snapshot should not be used if current accuracy is important. The snapshot should not be used to plan an actual journey. And certainly not without checking the results against current operator/agency publicity.
Vortex Map
The Vortex map summarises the prior snapshot in a fixed coordinate grid. This allows strategic links between geographic areas to be visualised in a consistent manner, regardless of administrative boundaries or nuances of route. Each grid is 0.01 (global) degrees in width, dividing the public transport network into 463 nodes. Such a matrix is crude, but broadly effective. All network nodes (stops, stations) within each grid square are amalgamated into a single point. The (2016) population of each grid square derives from Idescat/ICGC’s Quadtree analysis, which locates the resident population by grid square of 250 metres or less. The service patterns showns are for a typical day, excluding dedicated (Nitbus) night services.
The Vortex map includes the 3 most commonly proposed network changes:
- Diagonal tram: Initial option (direct, 6 new stops, on-street), service pattern as proposed by ATM in 2014 (as seen in 2018 technical report, illustration 14).
- L9/10 connection: All proposed stations, except for the Zona Franca branch beyond Motors (whose stations are ostensibly complete, but not opened, apparently due to lack of demand). The more frequent (2018) northern section headways are assumed throughout.
- Rodalies 2026: 2006-era suburban railway network routes and headways, as described in “Els serveis de transport públic” in the Generalitat’s report. Note that Rodalies 2026 is only partly contained within the AMB area, so cannot be fairly evaluated in its entirety.
Peak trams and trains per hour per direction have been multiplied by 13 to represent an average daily total. For example a 12 minute headway, or 5 per hour, 10 in each direction, equals 130 daily.
Live Demonstrations
Of Interest
- Bounded Buses: Torrassa is one of the most densely populated places in Europe, so should be ideal territory for public transport. But because of the administrative structure of bus concessions, none of Torrassa’s bus services connect with the city of Barcelona, a mere kilometre away. The connection is ostensibly affected by one (extremely busy) metro line. Filter for bus only and the issue is clear to see. Sants, on the opposite side of that administrative boundary, is much better connected by bus, including some very long routes across the city, whose distance is perhaps better suited to rail. But for relatively short, local trips towards Hospitalet, there are no bus routes.
- Contemporary Shopping: Virrei Amat is the most important traditional commercial shopping street in northern Barcelona, and even without including Fabra i Puig (a hub of interurban services), Virrei Amat retains strong public transport connectivity. Nearby La Maquinista is one of the largest modern shopping “malls” in Barcelona, albeit in a formally quite industrial area with little residential population, making La Maquinista more reliant on non-pedestrian transport. Virrei Amat’s public transport connections are about 50% better than La Maquinista. But La Maquinista still has twice as much connectivity as its forgotten sibling, Heron City, which was sited just too far from every major public transport corridor in the area.
- Night and Day: Sarrià’s daytime bus service offers less direct connectivity than its night-time bus service. Indeed even with rail, Sarrià is only marginally better connected in the day than in the night. This pattern is not uncommon: The best connected place in whole area, Plaça Catalunya, is better connected at night - albeit not at high frequency. TMB’s daytime network is intended to require interchange, quite unlike the Nitbus network. However the comparison of night and day highlights weaknesses in TMB’s network design, suggesting the importance of connecting people has become secondary to the importance of network visibility.
- Diagonal Tram: Sant Joan Despí is one of the main beneficiaries of the Diagonal tram connection (vs 2018 network), but even here the additional connectivity offered is quite modest: Unlike Hospitalet (see Bounded Buses above), TMB already operate bus through toward the city of Barcelona, and parts Sant Joan Despí and Cornallà already have access to (metro and Rodalies) railways which serve much the same broad axis as the tram. La Mina, a particularly deprived “edge-of-nowhere” urbanisation clearly gains, but primarily in connections to the less densely populated Llobregat. Connections which, for example, might be somewhat achieved by simply adding a station to the Rodalies network.
- Line 9/10: Torrassa demonstrates both the improved connectivity of completing the missing central section of L9/10, and how perhaps the need for the missing link in part reflects the contrained local bus network. L9/10’s emphasis on light-industrial Zona Franca, over the far more populous Cornellà axis, is curioisity of route design that should not need detailed analysis of connectivity to illustrate. However the Vortex map also reveals more unexpected connectivity changes in areas that appear to be already well served, especially at high frequency, such as northern Gràcia.
- Rodalies 2026: This proposal adds no new stations (it actually removes the historic terminus of França), but rather attempts to optimise service patterns to deliver higher frequencies. Plus a somewhat more curious obsession with the transveral Vallès axis - the principle AMB area beneficiary of which, Sant Cugat, cannot be fairly analysed because key destinations such as Matorell and Granollers are outwith the AMB area. The Vortex map does allow assessment of the impact within the AMB area - for example, that Badalona is marginally better connected to metropolitan Barcelona by the existing rail network and not the new, while AMB area connectivity is net similiar for Montcada i Reixac. Airport connectivity is improved, although the L9/10 connection improves it by significantly more.
Known Issues
Services are missing: Tourist services have been excluded, such as city tours, Tibidabo bus/funicular/tram, and port cruise terminal buses. Although some of these are legally public transport services, their premium fares are not part of the integrated (ATM) ticketing system, and their offer is not popularly considered part of Barcelona’s public transport system. Any other deficiencies reflect data missing from the GTFS files. Renfe data appears to be missing Rodalies trips to remote locations, such as Puigcerda and Portbou, thus slightly undercounts the service total within the AMB area. Otherwise these deficiencies are most likely to occur in the Vallès, where local bus concessions may neither appear in AMB or Generalitat de Catalunya data.
Sunday shows a greater count of TMB metro train journeys than weekdays: TMB metro operates late night Friday-Saturday and overnight Saturday-Sunday, journeys which are counted along with the core (daytime) service. Consequently Sunday includes 4 or 6 additional hours of operation on a metro network that otherwise varies little. However, these counts should be read with caution, since the metro is (uniquely) defined by average frequency over fixed time periods, not defined as a collection of individual scheduled trips. Differences can emerge between the advertised total and the actual total operated, if, for example, the operator advertises a “minimum guaranteed frequency”, which their actual operations augment.
The vortex map may double (or more) count the same service between pairs of nodes: The underlying route may provide the same link two or more times, merely from different stops within the vortex grid “square”, so is intentionally counted more than once. In contrast, services whose original stop sequence serves the same vortex grid node repeatedly (providing links wholly within one node) are only counted as if serving that node once. The map thus counts only each link made between vortex grid nodes.
License
The Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona dataset is a creative work of academic curiosity, a limited snapshot of one week in history. The original creator makes no claim of ownership to any data therein, nor should be held responsible for its accuracy. Such can therefore be used as “freely” as its source. All the data sources used to build the AMB dataset may be broadly considered “open”, generally only requiring citation and that information is not presented in a misleading manner, although precise licensing terms vary:
- AMB: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0.
- Bus Nou Barris (as website research): Proprietary, emphasising principle of good faith and good use.
- Generalitat de Catalunya: Non-denaturing reuse, citing source and date.
- FGC: FGC’s broad website conditions imply strictly “private” non-commercial use, however FGC’s website exists under the banner of the Generalitat de Catalunya, where Catalan law 19/2014 would imply allowing non-denaturing reuse which cites source and date. In practice FGC publish their GTFS files under the heading “Open Data” - a term implying reuse is acceptable.
- Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya (population): Creative Commons CC-BY 3.0.
- Renfe: Proprietary non-denaturing license requiring citation of source and date, with the attribution “Origen de los datos: Renfe Operadora”, herein summarised as “Renfe”.
- TMB: Proprietary non-denaturing license, formally requiring citation of source and date, and reuse exclusively “for the application”. The intention of this final clause appears to be to regulate end user software, which an Aquius dataset is not. Hosts may non-the-less wish to specifically apply to TMB.
- TRAM: Proprietary non-denaturing license, formally requiring the attribution “Powered by TRAM Barcelona”, herein summarised as “TRAM”.