News
TMB reinforces metro and buses with 358 professionals this summer
TMB is reinforcing its metro and bus networks this summer with 358 new professionals. The measure comes at a particularly demanding time for mobility in Barcelona, with more leisure journeys, works, occasional closures and major events testing public transport.
Of the total number of new hires, 229 will work as bus drivers and 129 will join the customer service staff on the metro network. All of them arrive after selection processes for which more than a thousand applicants applied in each area.
The reinforcement will be particularly noticeable in the daily service. In a city where the metro and bus carry a large share of everyday journeys, having more staff helps cover shifts, deal with incidents and maintain operations during the busiest months.
The arrival of new drivers also comes in a context of high demand for the bus network. Summer combines regular journeys with visitors, night-time plans, beaches, festivals, cultural events and traffic restrictions that can change routes or concentrate more passengers on particular lines.
On the metro, the 129 new customer service agents will reinforce a figure that is key to the network’s operation. Their work includes providing information, assisting users, supporting incident response and operational functions that are not always visible but help make the service more agile.
The recruitment drive also seeks to increase female representation within TMB. In the bus area, 56 new female drivers are joining, as part of a process that reserved 40% of posts for women in order to boost their presence in a historically male-dominated sector.
On the metro network, 66 of the new customer service agents are women. The company highlights that the trend is rising, after women represented 40% of new hires in this role last year.
Young people also stand out. More than half of those selected are under 30, a significant figure for a public company that needs to renew its workforce and guarantee generational replacement in essential services.
The metro’s customer service agent workforce is now approaching 2,000 people, with a female majority. This group takes on very varied tasks, from direct assistance at stations to functions linked to train movement and manoeuvring.
For users, the news will translate less into major visible changes and more into an underlying improvement: more hands to sustain the service when there are demand peaks, incidents or particularly complex days in the city.
Barcelona will experience a summer of intense mobility, with works on different networks, disruptions caused by events and greater tourist pressure on some corridors. In that context, strengthening the metro and bus is not only an internal staffing matter, but a way of trying to keep the city functioning when more people are on the move.
The challenge will be for these new hires to be felt in day-to-day life: better-attended stations, buses able to maintain service, better-informed users and a public network capable of absorbing a summer which, as every year, demands more than usual from metropolitan transport.