Sources: Zag Daily, Russpain Image source: Mahdi Samadzad, Unsplash

Barcelona transport authorities have spoken about their ambitions to make the city’s two municipal bike-share systems, AMBici and Bicing, interoperable, to create a public network that spans the whole metropolitan region. This comes against a backdrop of non-renewal of the city’s private bike-share operators, with licenses expiring in December 2026.

First implemented in 2007, the 8,000-strong Bicing network serves the inner-city area, and its use is limited to residents, rather than tourists. The AMBici system, operated by Connectambike, was launched in 2023 and spans 15 municipalities across the northern and southern edges of Barcelona’s metropolitan area, and is open to both residents and tourists alike.

Private, dockless bike-share systems joined the mix in 2020 following a tender process, with the initial ten operators settling to the current seven which between them manage a fleet of 3,500 units. However the management of these has been recently reported to be problematic, with numerous violations of parking and operating rules, and the operators receiving 5,500 fines since the beginning of 2025.

Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the public transport authority with responsibility for the city’s mobility network, aims to introduce a closer integration between AMBici and Bicing, with a long-term ambition to make the two systems interoperable.

Joaquim Balsera Garcia, TMB Chief Officer of Corporate and International Business and Marketing, said, “When AMBici connects with Bicing, Barcelona will host one of the largest bike sharing services in all of Europe. We want to manage AMBici not as an isolated service but as a fully integrated first and last-mile service. The plan is to consolidate a truly intermodal system in which each mode contributes value to the whole.”

AMBici was specifically designed to integrate with the city’s wider public transport network, with the e-bikes concentrated mainly around transport hubs such as metro and bus interchanges. This is in contrast to Bicing, which tends to be used as a complete alternative to bus or metro trips.

The question of how a merger of the residents-only Bicing and tourist-accessible AMBici would work in practice remains: “The merging of bike sharing across Bicing and AMBici is a future challenge for metropolitan mobility.”

Expansion challenges

TMB’s ambitions are to extend AMBici further than the current regions served; incremental expansions of the system to date have highlighted some of the operational challenges of balancing the services across a wider area. Demand shifts during the early-morning commuting hours had historically required a lot of manual coordination, however AI-driven fleet management tools, developed by Qucit and introduced by AMBici in 2025, have helped move from reactive to predictive logistics. Qucit also handles the Bicing fleet management.

Raphaël Cherrier, Founder and CEO of Qucit, describes the challenge: “Many trips go from one municipality to the other which means that, during the night, Connectambike’s teams need to rebalance the bikes and ensure that each municipality is treated fairly by 5:00AM.” He also described the differences between the two existing networks, with AMBici’s low density of bikes a contrast to Bicing’s inner-city offering. “In a dense area, you have a lot of bikes. Here, they are more spread out. So it’s a significant challenge in terms of field operations because every time you move bikes, you have to do it efficiently and be very mindful of the kilometres travelled.”