Cases, urban gender planning, women, gender perspective, gender equality, gender transports, Barcelona, Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, equality, gender-responsive
Travel conditions in the bus: “The bus is ours” project, in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona
The La Mirada Feminista group, of seven women technicians representing various services of the Barcelona Metropolitan Ares (AMB)’s Mobility, Transport and Sustainability Department, was launched in 2021 with the goal of integrating a feminist perspective into the activities of this institutional area. The group’s main goal is to facilitate mobility for people who have traditionally been overlooked and to infuse this perspective into all the tasks of our Area. The group seeks to foster debate, reflection, and action on how to permeate a feminist perspective in department’s daily activities, thereby defining technical solutions that consider all participants in metropolitan mobility, including those who have traditionally been “unseen”. Above all, they work through a threefold learning approach: drawing on the expertise of collaborators, the experience of users, and the administration’s holistic vision. Between 2022 and 2023, the group of La Mirada Feminista coordinated the project “The bus is ours!”, a participatory project that led to a qualitative assessment of the metropolitan bus service through women users’ participation in different municipalities of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area.
Tags: Urban planning, public services, Barcelona, gender perspective, public transport, accessibility, women, social inclusion, gender inclusion, urban gender planning, bus, public buses
Challenges addressed
Sucess factors
With the results, the group of La Mirada started to implement an action plan with actions and recommendations to be implanted at three levels:
- Improve bus shelters and stops, increasing accessibility and safety perceptions in these spaces and the surrounding environment, all through integrating gender criteria
- Review the design and distribution of furniture in the interior of buses to guarantee comfort for diverse bodies and needs
- Guarantee access to information and visibility inside the bus
- Improve the bus service to better respond to everyday mobility and mobility of care, by reviewing line maps and frequencies
- Increase communication and visibility of programs that improve everyday bus mobility from a gender perspective
Main objectives
- To conduct a participatory assessment through exploratory walks to improve the safety, sense of belonging, and comfort of women on the Barcelona Metropolitan Bus network in their everyday mobility
- Identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in the metropolitan bus network
- Contribute to improving information sources and work on monitoring indicators
- Support the determination of AMB’s role in policies at different levels and administrations that affect gender, safety, and mobility issues
- Define a long-term overall action strategy and prioritize short-term interventions or key projects.
Facts
| Project type | Mobility adaptation to improve the quality of life of women in day-to-day life |
| Partnership | Barcelona Metropolitan Area and Col·lectiu Punt 6 |
| Funding | Barcelona Metropolitan Area |
| Start Date | 2021-2023 |
Project description
“The Bus Is Ours!” project was launched to examine the travel conditions of AMB bus line users regarding comfort, safety, and a sense of belonging. One of the project’s phases consisted in facilitating exploratory rides on a series of AMB bus lines (L76, L95, B23, and 86) to cover different realities in terms of line type and user diversity. Two participatory observations were made also in two Night bus lines, also to assess the development of the program “Request a stop at night” piloted initially in two night lines and specifically to facilitate autonomy and safety among women and minor commuters traveling at night. In addition, the consulting team, Col·lectiu Punt 6, analyzed national and international experiences, measures and practices of mobility operators that have incorporated a gender perspective in public transport, in order to find inspiration in other gender-responsive practices already implemented in other territories. The results of the participatory project provided contextual and women-users qualitative data that assessed safety, comfortability and belonging in different scales of the bus service: the design and of the interior of buses looking at seats, space for people with reduced mobility, accessible signage and wayfinding; the design and placement of bus shelters and how they support women’s perception of safety and mobility of care; as well as elements of bus frequency, service, information and communication.
Impact and results
- Expansion of the Night bus – Request a stop service network to most metropolitan Night Bus lines and improve the information and communication about the service and how to use it
- Development of a guide for bus operators to conduct training with bus workers at all scales in how to integrate a gender perspective and address and prevent gender-based violence and other hate violence in their work.
- Launch of a communication campaign “Al bus cap abús” (At the bus no abuse) to raise awareness and prevent sexual harassment in public transport.
- Improvement on lines and schedules, expanding the frequency of some lines identified as essential to support care mobility trips.
- Improvement of bus stops shelters ensuring they are equipped with benches, transparent materials, lighting, real-time schedule information, etc
Publications & main documents related to the case
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LESSONS FOR PEER LEARNING
The coordination and development of the project by professional experts in feminist urban planning and mobility was essential to develop both the assessment and the action plan. The success of the project is the result of a group of trained and committed actors; since this technician group has been the leader and supporter of the initiative, even without having an official commitment from the institution
