EMT Madrid (short for Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid, Spanish for "Municipal Transport Company of Madrid") is the company charged with the planning of public urban transport in the city in

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

. The organization is wholly owned by the

City Council of Madrid The City Council of Madrid () is the top-tier administrative and governing body of Madrid, the capital and biggest city of Spain. The city council is composed by three bodies: the mayor, who leads the city council and the executive branch of it; ...

and is a member of the

Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid The Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (CRTM; literally: ''Regional Consortium of Transportation for Madrid'') is an autonomous body created by Spanish law 5/1985 which is tasked with coordinating the public transport operations across ...

. Among the services provided by EMT Madrid are urban bus transportation as well as the BiciMAD

bicycle-sharing system A bicycle-sharing system, bike share program, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share (PBS) scheme, is a shared transport service where bicycles are available for shared use by individuals at low cost. The programmes themselves include both ...

. EMT Madrid, Europe's second-largest municipal bus operator, achieved a significant milestone by completing the elimination of all diesel buses from its fleet by the end of 2022. This transition resulted in a fully modernized fleet consisting solely of gas-powered, hybrid, and fully

electric bus An electric bus is a bus that is propelled using electric motors, as opposed to a conventional internal combustion engine. Electric buses can store the needed electrical energy on board, or be fed mains electricity continuously from an external ...

es.

History

EMT Madrid was established on 12 November 1947 after the dissolution of the Joint Transport Company. Originally a municipal private company, in 1971 it became a joint stock company. It provided trolleybus service until it disappeared in 1966 and tram services until 1972. The current colour of the buses is blue and white. When the company was created in 1947, the buses were also blue, but in a darker shade than the current one, a legacy of the old Sociedad Madrileña de Tranvías. In 1974, taking advantage of the end of the trams two years earlier, the colour was gradually changed to red, culminating in 1986, the year in which all municipal buses were red. And so it was until 1992, when the first sky blue bus arrived, when Gas Natural buses began to enter the company, and these had their characteristic colour to define them from the rest. In the summer of 2008, the change of colour to the current blue began again, with the arrival of new buses and the disappearance of the old ones, with their red colour. The company has also gone through several different logos. It began with a round E inside which were placed an M and a T. And at the end of the 1970s, two red arrows (or yellow arrows on a red background) crossed together to indicate "Ven y Voy" (Come and I'm coming). In 2010 a blue logo appeared, just like the change of colour that was taking place on the buses, with the words EMT above a square with the city's coat of arms and the word "Madrid!". In 2018, with the entire fleet of buses already in blue, the logo was changed again - for the current one - which is a lowercase "e" followed by a white ">" sign on a blue background.

Multimodal public transport

City bus lines

The EMT manages a fleet of over 2,000 buses distributed in 223 lines that have an extension of 3,500 kilometers. As part of EMT's added value there is an open data system for the "Smart City",

CCTV Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of closed-circuit television cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signa ...

and free

WiFi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

connection both in the most relevant stops and in the whole bus fleet. To reduce the volume of polluting gases emitted by its vehicles through the use of alternative energies such as

compressed natural gas Compressed natural gas (CNG) is a fuel gas mainly composed of methane (CH4), compressed to less than 1% of the volume it occupies at standard atmospheric pressure. It is stored and distributed in hard containers at a pressure of , usually in ...

biodiesel Biodiesel is a renewable biofuel, a form of diesel fuel, derived from biological sources like vegetable oils, animal fats, or recycled greases, and consisting of long-chain fatty acid esters. It is typically made from fats. The roots of bi ...

, electric traction,

hydrogen Hydrogen is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol H and atomic number 1. It is the lightest and abundance of the chemical elements, most abundant chemical element in the universe, constituting about 75% of all baryon, normal matter ...

bioethanol Ethanol fuel is fuel containing ethyl alcohol, the same type of alcohol as found in alcoholic beverages. It is most often used as a motor fuel, mainly as a biofuel additive for gasoline. Several common ethanol fuel mixtures are in use a ...

; intensive renewal of the fleet with conventional diesel buses with strict environmental requirements. The buses in Madrid are the only public transport system available around the clock as the metro network closes down between 02:00 and 06:00 am. The night buses, also known as "''Buhos''" (Owls), operate from 23.45 to 06.00 am. The heavy traffic in Madrid can in some cases make the city buses a fairly slow form of transportation but the city of Madrid has more than 90 km of special bus and taxi lines to help solve this issue. Buses serving the outer areas are run by 33 private companies, coordinated by the ''

''. This network is fundamentally radial.''Estructura Economica de le Ciudad de Madrid''
, ''Ayuntamiento de Madrid'' (Madrid City Council), August 2013

BiciMAD

In May 2016, with the municipalization of the bicycle rental service (until then operated by Bonopark S.L.) by the City Council, the EMT assumed the management of this service with 7,500 bicycles.

Gallery

File:10 EMT Madrid.jpg, Mercedes-Benz Citaro NGT File:150_EMT_Madrid.jpg, Castrosua New City on Scania N280UB CNG File:EMT dejará de emitir 21.300 toneladas de gases invernadero entre 2019 y 2022 01.jpg, Irizar e-mobility electric bus File:BiciMAD.jpg, BiciMAD bike-sharing service (operated by EMT Madrid since 2016) File:Madrid desde el teleférico que lleva a la Casa de Campo - panoramio.jpg, Teleférico de Madrid (operated by EMT Madrid since 2018)

References

External links

Official site
{{authority control Transport in Madrid Government of Madrid Companies based in Madrid Transport companies established in 1947 Spanish companies established in 1947 Transport companies of Spain