“It is not a debate between the economy and the environment, but rather we are facing a challenge for public, private and mixed administrations and operators to build efficient and competitive mobility”. This was expressed by the Councilor for Mobility of the Barcelona City Council, Rosa Alarcón, in the event ‘Transport and new urban mobility’ organized by EL MUNDO held this Monday at Casa Seat in Barcelona. Alarcón pointed out that Barcelona has all the conditions to be “a laboratory of urban mobility” since there is a “great tradition in the automotive industry”, which is 10% of GDP and employs some 140,000 people from direct and indirect form, in addition to public and private collaboration in terms of mobility, its strategic location, the commitment to the ecological and energy transition and the concentration of innovation companies in this sector.
The councilor recalled that Barcelona has a first metropolitan crown with an efficient public transport network and that the new law on sustainable mobility and urban transport financing prepared by the Government may be an opportunity for the city to be a center for ecological and digital projects , especially taking into account the situation of economic and health crisis due to the coronavirus and the European funds that must be distributed. “Never before have citizens been so conscious of preserving the environment and people’s health”, added Alarcón, who defined mobility as “a set of services that are sustainable, shared and intermodal”.
That is why the City Council urges the Government to incorporate in the new law that is being prepared that the “metropolitan reality” be assumed not only in Barcelona, although here it stressed the importance of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona as a transport manager, but also © n in other large Spanish cities such as Madrid or Seville. They also demand a “new sustainable personal mobility”, as well as incorporating “vertical mobility” by incorporating ramps or stairs at points where there are unevenness for pedestrians. In addition, they consider that companies should have “travel plans” which would guarantee their own efficiency and effectiveness.
Alarcón also urged to build agreements between “administrations and operators on mobility, energy transition and the digital application in mobility” since it is the “new governance in a metropolitan key”. In this sense, he recalled that the State must make a “greater investment in sustaining public transport” and added that Barcelona’s challenge is to guarantee connections in what he calls Greater Barcelona, the towns of the second crown of the city, that goes through more financing of Cercanías trains and Line 9 of the metro from European funds.
From the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, the Strategy for Safe, Sustainable and Connected Mobility was presented at these conferences in which Sonia Hernández, deputy deputy director in the General Secretariat for Urban Policies, stressed the importance of a “strategic framework It is common to all Spanish municipalities “to apply these action plans that allow” planning cities with a transversal and integrated vision proposed by international frameworks “in addition to” favoring sustainable mobility or promoting public transport “. Adrián Muelas, advisor to the Technical Cabinet of the General Secretariat of Transport, pointed out that the new regulations that are being prepared will allow the “decarbonization of the transport system” and its “digitization” to make it more efficient the “demographic trends, with 80% urban population, and the daily mobility challenges both in cities and in rural areas”. These challenges go through some 160 measures that should affect from the improvement of air quality to the use of new technologies, the connection with the rest of the world or intermodal logistics chains, among others.
At the event, sponsored by Abertis and Seat and with FGC and Expansión as collaborators, there was also a round table on proposals from the sector for clean, competitive and connected mobility. Various representatives of companies such as Seat Abertism, Cabify or public organizations such as the Directorate General of Traffic (DGT) and Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC), have spoken about sustainable, multimodal and micromobility mobility; orderly and incentivized energy transition: intermodality, digitization and sustainable mobility to improve air quality; innovations in the transport sector; new smart mobility options or public-private collaboration.
From Seat, more “political consensus” has been demanded in the long term to know how to better plan the forecasts in addition to remembering that the situation due to Covid has changed the transport paradigms, such as the ‘boom of scooters, and the logistics. Abertis has highlighted the examples of urban tolls in other European cities and as a study establishes that if they are placed in Barcelona, the 500,000 cars that enter the city each day will be reduced by 25%, so in addition to helping regulate the traffic will allow the financing of this infrastructure. Cabify urged that sustainable mobility behaviors be rewarded and unsustainable ones punished.
The DGT faces this mobility with the challenge of improving the accident rate of motorcycles, pedestrians and cyclists, how to solve connectivity to have real-time data for operators and users and how to regulate the urban distribution of goods, since confinement has increased a 70% accidents to food delivery people for example. That is why they demand the same signaling and regulations in all municipalities so that any company can trust to send a truck to a city with a specific length to distribute without taking into account specific ordinances. Regarding scooters, he pointed out that it is being studied whether they can carry indicators and lower the speed allowed in circulation to 20 km / h. The FGC highlighted the importance of parking outside large cities for users to leave the car and travel by train. They also highlighted the evolution of the capacity of administrations to place data in real time in the cloud to provide information to both users and public-private operators.
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