Despite the high number of passengers using metropolitan public transport systems, the limited growth rates of travel demand have not been enough to reduce the use of private vehicles in the main points of access to the city, which continue to show unsustainable patterns with an excessive presence of private vehicles.

With economic activity halfway through, months of the pandemic caused us to forget day-to-day congestion. But with the gradual recovery of metropolitan activity and mobility and the impact of lifting highway tolls and mobility policies that reduced road capacity within the city, road congestion is back, with the consequent aggravation of air pollution levels.

Micromobility is based on the sharing of mechanically simple vehicles such as bicycles and scooters, now electrically powered, through electronic devices that access information in real time (that is, through the use of smartphone apps). The electric scooter is the most recent addition to this group of vehicles for individual mobility, which also includes the bicycle. The definition of micromobility has been discussed over recent months and years and has passed through the recent regulatory changes for the Spanish case. The electric scooter offers the possibility of short journeys, mainly replacing public transport, cycling and walking, in a portable folding vehicle. The spaces in which the regulation places electric scooters are very similar to cycling spaces: cycle network lanes and traffic-calmed streets. The pressure from the increase in the flow of vehicles caused by the addition of e-scooters (which sometimes even doubles it) to cycle lanes, and the risks arising from the cohabitation of motor-powered vehicles (scooters) and non-powered ones (into which category fall the vast majority of bicycles) in the same space, reveal the need to improve the capacity and safety of cycling infrastructures and to provide safe shared roads in which speed reductions are effective. In the immediate future, it will be important to continue to question the differences and similarities between the vehicles making up the concept of micromobility and the use made of them in order to generate policies that offer fair, healthy and safe access to micromobility for everyone.

Data is a promising game-changer for future mobility. Effective data sharing between cities, public transport operators and private mobility service providers has the potential to boost better mobility management while enhancing the competitiveness of private stakeholders. This article provides a description of the different barriers that mobility stakeholders, both public and private, must overcome in order to unlock the value that data can provide to improve the business models of mobility operators and support informed urban mobility planning. In addition, the proliferation of micromobility services reshaping urban mobility generates a need for policymakers to understand these new trends by requesting data of mobility operators while ensuring fair data-informed mobility policies. This article also goes into depth on such intangible aspects as trust, which plays a key role in unlocking value from sharing data. Why are operators reluctant to share their data? How can users’ privacy be protected and operators’ competitiveness preserved by anonymising data? The MDS and CDS-M initiatives propose ways to govern data sharing from shared service providers to cities. A consensus option is that all parties trust a third party that handles data. An analysis of pros and cons is provided, including real-world examples, highlighting the fact that there is no optimal option for all possible scenarios, because this depends on the level of risk and intervention that the stakeholders involved are willing to take. Data also plays a key role in enabling MaaS (Mobility as a Service), as increasing the availability of data is a precondition to achieving superior integration levels (from one to four): many cities already have access to mobility datasets from private mobility operators as a prerequisite for receiving a licence to operate in cities (Level 1). Level 2 uses available data to develop evidence-based decisions aimed at creating more effective mobility policies, but only a few cities have reached this stage through pilot projects. Finally, MaaS Levels 3 and 4 will add pricing strategies with the ability to influence mobility users’ behaviour and mobility management to promote societal goals through access to real-time data from various mobility services. The use of Software as a Service platforms such as the novel Rideal will play a key role in designing incentives programmes to nudge behavioural change towards more sustainable mobility.

The development of segregated road infrastructures in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona has generated high demand of traffic and the negative externalities associated with this. It has also conditioned the urban metropolitan structure and generated significant infrastructural barriers. It is as necessary to promote physical channels of priority for sustainable transport as it is to connect the city on a more human scale. This article presents some of the initiatives of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB) for achieving this, particularly a network of metropolitan avenues as a structure for boosting sustainable transport and connecting the metropolitan city. The conceptualization of this network is explained, along with its implications at both a local level and a metropolitan/regional level with its coordination with segregated roads.

Mobile marketing is a field of digital marketing constantly being reinterpreted due to the unstoppable progress of smart devices, founded little more than ten years ago, which have little to do with the conventional mobile phones that appeared in the nineteen nineties. In the same manner that interconnected mobility is changing human habits, the rest of the areas in digital marketing knowledge are adapting to a new reality which does not yet have known behavioural patterns. Mobility has an immense impact on digital marketing spheres, such as advertising, search engines, social networks, email marketing and promotional marketing. All these have been transforming, to the detriment of traditional browsing and functionalities linked to desktop computers. We are therefore reaching that moment in which digital mobility itself forms an implicit part of the definition of marketing. We could say that the concept independent of mobile marketing has its days numbered.