Barcelona is undergoing a smart city transformation and has become highly digitalized over the past ten years, increasing urban quality of life for its citizens. This smart city revolution is dramatically transforming mobility services, thanks to the efforts of both public and private actors. One such actor is the public agency Barcelona Regional, created by Barcelona City Council. This agency is currently investigating the opportunities for the development of a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform. In addition, there are private MaaS initiatives coming up, such as the RACC Trips, which include multimodal travel planning and digital reservations for public transport and vehicle sharing schemes. There is also a project for a card-based smart ticketing system called T-Mobilitat, which will enable and reinforce the MaaS eco-system.

However, with the digital transformation of the mobility system, a new challenge has arisen – ensuring that citizens are able to use the new technologies, as benefiting from mobility innovations such as MaaS platforms and ‘T-Mobilitat’ requires digital skills and access to ICTs.

While a 2016 study done by Mobile World Capital Barcelona, ‘The digital divide in the city of Barcelona’, found that Barcelona is a well-connected city with high Internet usage and access rates, there remain gaps with regard to access, use, and quality of ICT usage, due to variables such as age, profession, education level and income. According to the study, the digital divide is most pronounced for unemployed, older citizens and population with a low education level.

In addition, much of the city’s industry is concentrated in an area of Barcelona that historically has had problems of mobility and accessibility. Many rely on private cars to get to work, as the area is not well-connected by public transport. As a result, companies there find it difficult to retain new talent, as the lack of access discourages potential employees from taking these job opportunities.

Three issues have been identified: those who are left out of the labor market because they can’t reach the areas where jobs are, employees who suffer high costs and long commuting times, and companies that struggle to find and keep talent. Not all employees have a private vehicle, either because of the cost or because they are unable to drive. Those who depend on their cars to get to work are being increasingly affected by traffic and new regulations, which are set to become even more restrictive. Women, immigrants and people with disabilities are usually identified as the most affected groups but educational level is also a factor.

Given that digital exclusion is highly correlated with social exclusion, groups with less access to digital platforms that provide mobility alternatives will tend to become even more excluded. It is a challenge to define and design a MaaS implementation that ensures the inclusion of vulnerable groups, particularly with regard to the aforementioned industrial areas, and provides alternatives to reduce citizens’ dependence on private cars.