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.

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.