I visited Barcelona this week for the first time since 2020. Within an hour of arriving, I felt a significant shift had occurred since my last visit. Cyclists had become part of the fabric of the city rather than navigating around it.
I first noticed the seeds of change back in 2020. Even then, wandering into the early superblocks, you could feel something changing - the sudden quiet of streets that had been noisy, congested roads just months before, replaced by wide, calm spaces where the odd cyclist drifted past almost silently. It felt like an experiment. Something tentative. A city trying something out.
Six years later it no longer feels tentative. It feels like a decision that has been made and followed through on.
Cycling is far from Barcelona's primary mode of transport. As of 2025, it represents around 3% of all urban trips - a far cry from Copenhagen (49%) or Amsterdam (35%), and it has not seen the dramatic transformation that Paris has achieved in recent years - where cycling more than doubled in a handful of years driven by an extraordinarily aggressive infrastructure programme. But it feels broadly comparable to where London is now: a city that has made genuine, sustained progress over a decade or so, where cycling is becoming a normal part of urban life rather than a fringe activity. You can certainly see its tyre print.
What has changed is that cycling in Barcelona now feels genuinely feasible. A real, practical option for getting around the city rather than an act of optimism. That is a bigger shift than it sounds.
Where Barcelona Started
It is easy to assume Barcelona has always been a cycling city. It has not. In 2010, cycling represented just 2% of all urban trips - roughly the same share as taxis. Daily cycling trips stood at around 30,000. The bike lane network totalled 133km, much of it poorly connected and inconsistently designed. The infrastructure existed in fragments. The culture did not.
Bicing - the city's public bike share system - had launched in 2007 and grown steadily, but it was limited in reach, predominantly mechanical, and used mainly by a core of committed urban cyclists. It was promising. It was not yet transformative.
What the data from 2010 shows is a city with all the ingredients for change and none of the momentum. That would come later - and not without setbacks.
The Conservative Setback: 2011–2015
Barcelona's progress was not linear. When a pro-car conservative government came to power in 2011, they lifted restrictions on car use in the historic city centre, eliminated the entire 15-person professional cycling planning team, and reversed several car-free zone policies. Cycling modal share fell from 5.6% back to 4%. Progress reversed almost immediately.
The bike lane network continued to grow - projects already underway were completed - but the pace slowed dramatically, from 20-40km of new lanes per year to just 5-10km. The institutional knowledge and planning capacity that had been built up disappeared overnight.
It is a cautionary tale worth taking seriously. Infrastructure alone is not enough. Political will is the multiplier. And when that political will disappears, so does the progress.
The 2015 Turning Point
The return of a pro-cycling administration in 2015 triggered a step-change. The Bicycle Strategy launched, setting ambitious targets and backing them with institutional machinery that had been notably absent in the previous four years. Annual infrastructure additions returned to 20-40km per year. The superblock programme began in earnest. And the city started doing something that most cities are still unwilling to do: taking space from cars and giving it to cyclists.
Between 2015 and 2019 alone, Barcelona removed approximately 3,000 car parking spaces to build new cycle lanes. The network grew from 162km to 209km in four years — nearly doubling. This is the decision that changed everything. Not the bike lanes themselves, but the willingness to make the trade-off that was necessary to build them.
The Superblock Effect
Alongside the bike lane expansion came the superblock programme — superilles in Catalan. Superblocks are 400 x 400 metre clusters of city blocks where interior streets are closed to through traffic. Cars can still access residents' properties, but rat-running is eliminated. The result is quiet, low-speed streets where cyclists and pedestrians have genuine priority.
I first felt this in 2020, when the early superblocks were just beginning to take hold. Walking into one from a main road was disorienting — the noise dropped, the pace slowed, the street belonged to different people. It felt experimental. Six years later it feels normal, which is exactly the point.
Since 2020, superblocks have reclaimed around eight hectares of road space from motor vehicles across Barcelona. That is eight hectares of city returned to people. The programme is continuing to expand, with more superblocks planned across all ten districts of the city.
Bike lanes alone do not make streets feel safe. Removing through traffic from residential streets does. The superblock model is one of the most transferable ideas in urban planning right now — and it has barely been tried in the UK.
The Rise of Cycling in Numbers
The average number of bicycle trips per weekday in Barcelona increased almost six-fold over the 15-year period from 2004 to 2019 — from 30,000 to 167,000. By 2026 that figure has held and continued to grow.
The growth was not steady. It accelerated sharply after 2015 when the infrastructure buildout began in earnest, dipped slightly during the pandemic in 2020, and then rebounded strongly as the city capitalised on changed habits and expanded infrastructure.
Bicing: The Bike Share That Actually Works
Barcelona's public bike share system, Bicing, is one of the most successful urban cycling programmes in the world — and understanding why matters, because most cities get bike share badly wrong.
The original Bicing launched in 2007 and grew steadily but modestly. In 2019 it was completely overhauled: more stations, more bikes, and crucially, a large fleet of electric bicycles. Today the system has 8,000 bikes across 557 stations, with 60% of the fleet electric. Annual membership costs €50. It is priced, deliberately, as a utility rather than a lifestyle product. Compare that to London's Santander Cycles, which is significantly more expensive and covers a fraction of the city.
Since the 2019 relaunch, Bicing has recorded over 100 million journeys. Each bike is used an average of 7.1 times per day — making it the most intensively used bike share system in Europe per bicycle, ahead of Paris. With 166,000 active subscribers making 1.5 million journeys per month, Bicing has stopped being a nice-to-have and become genuine infrastructure.
The most significant detail: 80% of Bicing journeys are now made on electric bikes. E-bikes remove the fitness, distance and topography barriers that stop ordinary people cycling. When 8 out of 10 bike share trips are electric, you are no longer building a system for cyclists. You are building a system for everyone.
How the Modal Share Has Shifted
Cycling's share of all urban trips in Barcelona has grown from around 2% in 2010 to approximately 3% today. That sounds like a modest improvement. In the context of a city of 1.6 million people with deeply embedded car culture, it represents a meaningful shift in how the city moves.
The city's 2024 Urban Mobility Plan sets a target of 5% cycling modal share — which would represent a 129% increase from its 2019 baseline, requiring 300 individual measures to achieve. It has not been hit yet. But the trajectory is clear, and the infrastructure now in place makes it achievable in a way it simply was not a decade ago.
To put Barcelona's numbers in perspective: Amsterdam sits at around 35% modal share, Copenhagen at 49%. Even Paris, which has seen explosive cycling growth since 2020, is approaching 15% in the city centre. Barcelona's 3% shows how much room there is to grow — and how much work the city still has ahead of it.
What Barcelona Still Gets Wrong
Barcelona is not a finished project. The modal share target has not been hit. Car culture remains deeply embedded, particularly beyond the city centre where the road network still strongly prioritises private vehicles.
Conflict between cyclists, e-scooter riders and pedestrians is real and growing. The 2024 amendments to the Byelaw on Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic — which banned cycling on pavements and introduced significant fines — are partly a response to that conflict. That the city now takes cycling seriously enough to regulate it properly is, in its own way, a sign of maturity. But the conflict itself signals that the infrastructure has not yet fully caught up with demand.
Hilly northern neighbourhoods like Sarrià and Horta-Guinardó were historically underserved by both bike lanes and Bicing, with nearly 30% of new 2025 stations specifically targeting these areas. The work is only beginning. A city where cycling is only easy in the flat centre is not truly a cycling city.
The Numbers at a Glance
- Daily cycling trips up 6x since 2004 — from 30,000 to over 167,000
- Bike lane network grown from 133km in 2010 to 263km in 2026
- Superblocks have reclaimed 8 hectares of road space from motor vehicles since 2020
- 3,000 car parking spaces removed between 2015 and 2019 to build new cycle lanes
- Bicing hit 100 million journeys since its 2019 relaunch
- 80% of Bicing journeys now made on electric bikes
- 166,000 active Bicing subscribers — annual membership just €50
- Europe's most intensively used bike share — 7.1 trips per bike per day
- Cycling modal share target of 5% — not yet achieved but within reach
What UK Cities Can Learn
Barcelona's progress came from three things working together: political will, serious infrastructure investment, and affordable bike share designed as a utility. No single one of those alone created the change. All three together did.
The superblock model is directly applicable to dense UK urban neighbourhoods and has barely been tried. The Bicing pricing model — €50 per year — compares favourably with London's Santander Cycles, which is significantly more expensive and less extensive. And the willingness to remove car parking spaces to build cycle lanes is the conversation that UK cities are still largely unwilling to have.
Perhaps most importantly, Barcelona shows that the political setback of 2011-2015 — when a single change of government reversed years of progress — is not inevitable. The response in 2015 was to rebuild the planning capacity that had been lost and accelerate harder. The lesson for UK cities is not just that progress is possible, but that it has to be protected.
Barcelona in 2026 is not Amsterdam. It is not Copenhagen. It is not even Paris. But it is a city where cycling has gone from marginal to meaningful — where the infrastructure has reached a tipping point, where the bike share system genuinely works, and where the streets feel different from how they felt six years ago.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
Have you cycled in Barcelona recently? Has the city changed since you were last there? Leave a comment below — we would love to hear your experience.
Sources: Streetsblog USA · MDPI Sustainability Journal · Barcelona City Council Mobility · BSM (Bicing) · Barcelona City Council · Active Travel Studies
