Murcia in the 5th European E-mobility stakeholder Forum

Murcia participated on 23 & 24 march 2017 in the 5th European E-mobility stakeholder Forum in Brussels. The City of Murcia, represented by ALEM, the Local Agency for Energy and Climate Change, was invited to participate in the session called “Local strategies and policies to support E-mobility”.

Brussels 22/23 March 2017. photos : vivianhertz.be

The organization recognized the great work done to develop the recent E-mobility strategy of the city of Murcia and was his author, Jaime Ruiz Huescar, the responsible of introducing it to the attendees in this session. As he stated, this strategy can be described as an innovative and integrative policy commitment that is focused on the specific needs of the citizens of Murcia and represent the most important milestone made in Murcia in terms of promoting the Electro mobility so far.

Brussels 22/23 March 2017. photos : vivianhertz.be

The City of Murcia has been working intensely since September 2016 in the development of this Strategy and it was in that month when the draft document was presented in a public event where many different stakeholders were called, such as car dealers, associations related to the sustainable mobility and various experts in the field. This event also meant the kick off of a participation process aimed to enrich and complete the draft document of the e-mobility strategy.

This process allowed the municipality firstly to request the collaboration of experts in sustainable mobility and the citizens of Murcia to assess the 33 measures included in the document and secondly to invite them to propose new measures and ideas for the implementation of these actions. The period of collection for contributions, their analysis and final wording of the document concluded in March 2017. The city of Murcia, through ALEM, will present in May the final document and the first measures to be implemented in order to foster and support the deploy of the electric vehicle in our city.

The 50 measures included in the strategy are the most important milestone with regards to policies of support to the electric vehicle realized until now in Murcia. Among these first measures of urgent implementation we can mention the creation of an EV charging network on the public road, the reservation of exclusive parking spaces for electric vehicles and exemption in the payment of the regulated municipal parking, measures that are already being studied by the department of Urbanism and Environment.

During this session, Jaime Ruiz also gave the key aspects of the “Roadmaps for energy” project and explained that the involvement of the Municipality in the project has triggered the development of the e-mobility strategy as the most important step taken towards smart mobility during the last years in Murcia.