- The EIT Urban Mobility initiative, “Challenge My City”, is to facilitate multimodal urban connectivity, sustainable logistics and cycling and pedestrian safety in Madrid between different sustainable modes of transport.
- This initiative has attracted an investment of €250,000 in Madrid from EIT Urban Mobility for entrepreneurs from seven pilot projects to implement their solutions for 6 months.
- Today’s inauguration of the pilot projects was presented by Borja Carabante, Delegate for the Environment and Mobility of Madrid, Lola Ortiz, Director General of Mobility Planning and Infrastructures of the Madrid City Council, and Lluis Puerto, EIT Urban Mobility Market Development Director.
Madrid, 16 January 2023. Today, EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, and the Madrid City Council, have presented the #ChallengeMyCity programme. At this event, seven innovative urban mobility solutions of the five start-ups have been inaugurated. The main objective of these innovative mobility pilots is to provide Madrid City Council with new ways to facilitate sustainable door-to-door travel through the promotion of intermodality.
During Monday’s presentation, representatives of both organisations visited the first solar-powered charging station for electric scooters and bicycles that facilitates multimodal urban connectivity through sustainable means of transport, implemented by the Sevillian start-up Solum at Chamartín Station.
“At EIT Urban Mobility we are truly committed to cities, and we understand that technology is essential to achieve sustainable urban mobility that benefits everyone. Therefore, we must move towards collaboration between city councils, citizens, and companies if we want to achieve this“, says Lluís Puerto, Director of Market Development at EIT Urban Mobility.
Sustainable mobility, the great challenge for cities
Madrid City Council and EIT Urban Mobility have cooperated over the last year through the #ChallengeMyCity programme to deploy up to seven pilots of innovative urban mobility solutions provided by different start-ups and organisations in different parts of the city. Concretely, EIT Urban Mobility experts have worked with technicians from the mobility planning area of the Madrid City Council to determine the mobility challenges facing the city, aligning with the mobility policies approved in the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (PMUS) and the investments made or planned by the City Council. This initiative has attracted an investment of €250,000 in Madrid, by EIT Urban Mobility.
Five start-ups – Vadebike, Solum, SmartPoint, Dashfactor and Vianova – three of them Spanish, and a total of seven projects, have been selected through an open competition at European level whose objective is to implement these services in open mobility environments over the next six months. These projects will collect anonymised data on their use and will analyse the environmental, economic, and social benefits they can bring to each city. The projects are:
- Vadebike: has installed a secure bicycle parking area in Plaza de Castilla, next to the metro. In this way, it facilitates intermodality between sustainable means of transport such as bicycles and public transport, thus resolving one of the factors that most concerns users, namely the security of their bicycle against theft. The fully digitised car park allows users to safely store both their bicycle and their helmet during the day, encouraging the use of micro-mobility in combination with other sustainable modes of transport at the Plaza Castilla Interchange.
- SmartPoint: has 10 e-commerce parcel collection points, digitally connecting the delivery logistics chain with end customers, who travel to pick up their products at SmartPoint’s ticket offices. In this way, door-to-door delivery and the associated polluting emissions are avoided.
- Dashfactory: will install 125 smart cameras on bicycles, equipped with sensors to detect risk situations for cyclists, black spots and bike lanes with more intensive use. All the information generated on a daily basis will be available to the City Council for the detection of points where to reinforce safety or prioritise the construction of cycle lanes. The data generated through this pilot will allow the city to improve road conditions for Madrid’s cyclists and encourage cycling.
- Vianova: has a digital dashboard through which municipal technicians can visualise anonymised data on the use of shared mobility vehicles, to which a module for analysing pedestrian use of public space has been added, so that pedestrian areas can be improved and conflicts with micro-mobility users can be avoided. This pilot, which has been launched around the new pedestrian area of Puerta del Sol, will allow the City Council to understand the behavioural patterns of pedestrians and micro-mobility users, and thus create and improve new pedestrian areas in Madrid.
- Solum: has implemented a station with a universal charging system for electric scooters and bicycles, which also provides safe parking for users. The station has a solar floor that provides energy, making it a completely autonomous and sustainable installation. It has been installed at Chamartín Station as part of the project to convert the station into a multi-service hub to facilitate intermodal travel by sustainable means of transport.
- Car park for shared scooters: also part of the Chamartín multiservice project, a new car park has been created for shared electric scooters. This space has been created through the conversion of a car park for private motor vehicles, and favours multimodality between micro-mobility and public transport.
- Parking point for electric vehicles: located in the Chamartín multi-service hub, it favours the use of rideshare services and electric vehicles to reach the station, thus promoting sustainable mobility in combination with public transport.
In 2023, four new cities will join the programme. Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), Braga (Portugal), Larisa (Greece) and Heraklion (Greece) will work with EIT Urban Mobility over the course of a year to implement innovative solutions adapted to their mobility challenges.
The #ChallengeMyCity programme – 2022 edition has implemented 9 innovative solutions from 7 start-ups in 3 European cities: Milan, Toulouse, and Madrid.
