• The conference entitled ‘El nou paradigma de la informació de la mobilitat i la seva gestió’ [The new paradigm of mobility information and its management], hosted by the ATM and the Government of Catalonia, presented the CGIT of Catalonia and its innovations for the future of mobility information throughout the region.
   
• Different sector agents debated the current challenges facing future mobility from the perspective of MaaS (Mobility as a Service)

Barcelona, 7 October.- The conference, entitled ‘El nou paradigma de la informació de la mobilitat i la seva gestió’, hosted by the ATM and the Government of Catalonia, was held at the headquarters of the Department of the Vice Presidency, Digital Policies and Territory.

The event was kicked off with an institutional welcome by Mercè Rius, the Director General of Transport and Mobility of the Government of Catalonia, who spoke of the steps taken by the public sector to standardise information collection systems. Rius also underscored the administration's desire to align this objective with a more equitable fare system, the elimination of fare zones, and in short, the provision of an equitable service throughout the entire region. "With the Catalan Transport Information Management Centre (CGIT), we are making progress in the collection of real-time information to serve users, which will facilitate mobility now and in the future", she said.

Next came the presentation of the CGIT and its innovations for the future of mobility information in Catalonia. Ramon Bacardí, the director of T-mobilitat at the Barcelona ATM, stressed the importance of the centre, defining it as: "an information hub conceived in 2016, with the capacity to digitalise and unify data, to enable users and operators to manage their own information". Along these lines, Bacardí underscored the need "to integrate and process all the data from the different transport networks and operators" to make the travel experience as useful and user-friendly as possible and to make it easier for users to take decisions, both when planning and during their journey. Finally, as head of T-mobilitat, he reminded those present that complex projects like T-mobilitat provide information digitalisation and integration, among other things that were as not possible with the previous magnetic system.

Guillem Vall, the head of the Barcelona ATM’s Catalan Transport Information Management Centre, explained how the CGIT operates at the technical level, stressing its importance as a "reference hub for the coordination of scheduled information and the status of the service among operators and users", he said. For his part, Marc Roca, a technician at the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, mentioned the centre's potential as a source of proactive measures to minimise the effects of incidents, through real-time alerts.

As regards the notification of changes in the public transport network, the coordinator of the Barcelona ATM's T-mobilitat Centre, Sònia Gómez, offered an overview of the modernisation process of the old TransMet, which was initially run by the TMB (since 1998 via radio or teletext), to the use of the current digital channels, including the
T-mobilitat website and app, Twitter and Telegram.

After an interactive activity with the participants, a round table discussion was held on the future of mobility information, where sector agents analysed innovative projects on mobility information and discussed the sector's future trends. Ramon Pruneda, the technical director of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) Information and Services, emphasised the need to guarantee the "quality of the information". For this reason, he noted: "at the AMB we have invested heavily in automated real-time geolocation and vehicle occupancy tools". Speaking from the perspective of private transport, Cristian Bardají, the director of mobility at the RACC mobility club, identified three challenges: "(1) making good use of the potential of the data we already have; (2) transforming them into valuable information for users; and (3) increasing reliability in comparison with other information integrators, such as Google".

For her part, Carme Fàbregas, the director of the Department of Innovation and Systems at the Barcelona ATM, pointed out several challenges facing the public administration: "We are required to organise the service's information bidirectionally", stressing the need for data to be available at all times. Fàbregas also praised the work carried out thus far, with the integration of the public transport network and projects such as T-mobilitat, which were designed with the aim of eventually converging in a future MaaS (Mobility as a Service).

Finally, after an open round of questions from the attendees, the conference was brought to a close by Sergi Martínez-Abarca, the head of the Barcelona ATM's Transport Management Service. Martínez-Abarca concluded the event by reminding the participants that, given the demand for information and data, the public administrations and operators must be "reliable", make information "accessible" and thus guarantee "service efficiency".

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