Barcelona press conference

On December 21st was held in Barcelona a press conference to announce the end of the European project Ele.C.Tra (Electric City Transport) and present the main results of it.

Francisco Cardenas, project manager of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona (BCNecologia), spoke about the state of the play regarding electric mobility in Barcelona and the expectations about it. Later, Jordi Abadal, responsible of BCNecologia for the Ele.C.Tra project talked about it, its main objectives, the actions taken, the lessons learnt and the future actions envisaged.

The aim of the Ele.C.Tra project was to promote a new model of mobility in urban environments. This model had to accomplish a number of requirements such as to help to improve life quality in cities, to reduce the pollution and to raise awareness about the need of changing towards more sustainable means of transport. It needed to have a standard structure that allowed it to be transferred to other cities and that, in the future, could be linked to other means of transport. That model was a sharing of electric motorbikes.

Barcelona was one of the three pilot cities of the project, along with Genoa and Florence. It had certain advantage because there was already announced the launching of a system of the characteristics above described. That was Motit. In the press conference it was explained in what consisted this service and that the project monitored its deployment. But at this moment, the service has apparently ceased.

Far from being dead and buried, Motit announces its return in 2016 with new funding. It won’t come alone because there are two other companies that will announce the deployment of services of similar characteristics at the beginning of 2016.

First of them is Cooltra, which has a wide experience in the renting of motorcycles. Electric models were added to its offer in recent times and the service that they will launch will be similar to the Motit one. The main differences are that the service area where it will operate will be bigger than the Motit one, and that its motorbike allows two users instead of only one. Cooltra will put 250 vehicles in the streets of Barcelona from the beginning of the service.

The other company is the start-up Yugo, which will start with few motorbikes and aims to grow progressively as the market demands. The vehicle, which has a retro look, allows two users too.

As it was said in the press conference, all these initiatives prove that a project like Ele.C.Tra was meaningful, because it is clear that there is room in the cities for this kind of mobility. Other initiatives taken in the other pilot cities (Genoa and Florence) were also explained.

The project ends now but it has long way ahead. In the next months, years, we will be able to see the fruits of it. The cities that were not pilot now will see mobility projects based on those that the Ele.C.Tra project has described. In the case of Barcelona, we will see if the services can really work, if the citizens are prepared to this new type of mobility.