I wonder if they are also coincidentally adding a high priced bus service targeted at tourists. Park Gurl stands on a very steep hill in Barcelona's suburbs, and getting there without public transportation is between challenging and impossible depending on your mobility needs.
The world turned upside down, their response to an overcrowded bus was to misinforming to prevent people from using it, and not to add more buses to the route... why people even bother to visit such city is beyond comprehension.
They removed the "Bus del barri" line that uses minibuses from popular apps like Google Maps and Moovit, mostly used by tourists. These buses are mainly for the neighbours, and goes through narrow streets to take them shopping/connect them with other lines.
If they want to handle all the demand in that line, they'd probably need many more buses, which is more expensive and would cause more congestion than just hiding that line from popular calculators.
There are more options to get to Parc Güell, such as bus lines V19, 24, 129 and others, with a small walk, leaving the "Bus del Barri" (literally "Neighbourhood bus") for the actual neighbours, which can still find the schedules at tmb.cat and the official mobile app.
It seems "Bus del Barri" on tmb.cat corresponds to lines 122 to 131 [1]
Only the 129 bus seems to have little to do with the park when you select it [2], so if we are talking about those bus lines, the translation certainly is "Our bus, not yours" by the city council.
Nope, there are more lines, as per the Wikipedia article you mentioned [1] and TMB's bus map [2] at the bottom right corner, lines 112 to 135 are Bus del Barri, being 116 (La Salut-Gràcia) originally line 216 inaugurated in 2000
> so if we are talking about those bus lines, the translation certainly is "Our bus, not yours" by the city council.
The translation is "buses with small capacity going through smaller neighbourhood streets so neighbours can get to the doctors' or school without walking as much or depending on a car". Especially since those are less populated areas and closer to the mountain.
Problem here is line 116 stops right next to Parc Güell, and other lines that allow for bigger buses don't stop as close, so most transit apps provided routes using line 116, essentially flooding it.
Until they find a better solution, they decided to stop showing that route in the apps, so people won't use it as much. Neighbours and people that use the TMB app will still see it (so tourists using the official app will too), but it will get rid of many users with such a simple step.
I believe that the solution starts with increasing the number of buses or adding stops to existing bus lines with bigger capacity, while studying the algorithms and passenger flow involved. However, if the city council has decided to maintain costs, reducing the number of buses on weekends included, it seems unlikely that they will seek out other solutions. The city council has set a precedent that is probable to happen again.
