To fall in love with Barcelona you need to come and feel it, meet its people, walk its streets, and experience the local vibe.

Considered one of the world’s best culture hubs, it’s filled with architectural masterpieces, mouth-watering tapas, golden beaches, sun and innumerable things to explore.

Besides Barcelona being known for its brilliant architecture, art museums, beaches and tasty cuisine, the capital of Catalunya excels in public transport and is committed to environmental, sustainable mobility and social issues.

For these reasons, along with many more make the city a perfect location for hosting the UITP Summit.

UITP is proud to host the next edition of the UITP Global Public Transport Summit in Barcelona, Spain from 4-7 June 2023.

Seize this unique opportunity for growth and development in this fabulous city by joining the whole industry at the UITP Summit. It’s the ideal place to connect with your customers and position yourself as a leader of urban mobility.

Barcelona has an enviable public transport system which offers a multitude of transport modes to navigate around the vast city. The city continues to progress towards an excellent interconnected metropolitan public transport.

Now, the current public transport network in the Barcelona metropolitan area includes 8 metro lines (121,4 km), 8 suburban lines with more than 600 km of urban and suburban network, 2 tram networks (29,1 km) and 784 bus lines (urban and suburban) going over 15.000 km.

The history of public transport in Barcelona comes from a very long tradition. Its metro system will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2024 whilst its main suburban rail celebrated the 150th anniversary of the opening of its first section between Barcelona and the former town, now neighbourhood, of Sarrià in 2013.

Barcelona as a world class reference city in terms of implementing high technology solutions for urban environments. The following are a few inspiring projects being undertaken in the city.

T-Mobilitat Project

The ticketing system is about to make a huge leap forward with T-Mobilitat. This new system will allow contact-less and mobile validation across all modes and operators and it will be in operation this year. Public transport users will be able to buy their tickets online and validate by just tapping their travel card or smartphone, regardless of mode of transport or operating company.

L9 Metro Line

L9 is an automatic metro line of 50 km with two sections already in service that connects existing metro and rail lines and reaches key mobility areas such as Barcelona-El Prat Josep Tarradellas Airport, the world-class business and convention centre of Fira de Barcelona, the well-known FC Barcelona stadium or, in the near future, the new Sagrera High Speed Station.

But beyond this enormous project there are several metropolitan extensions under work or planned regarding FGC urban and suburban rail network that will allow to interconnect several suburban lines breaking the radial structure of the current network and generating new interchanges and transport nodes.

Superblock’s Project

The Superblocks Project consist on the pacification of streets inside a group of adjacent blocks, freeing space for green areas, recreation and sustainable mobility. Within these blocks, traffic would be limited to 10km/h, with public and thorough transport circulating on the bordering streets. Barcelona is building eight of these “superblocks” in different areas of the city and citizens have already started enjoying streets re-designed to a more human size.