Why Madrid is the Ideal City for Shared Mobility

Among all the carsharing success stories that you will hear, there is one city that often stands out from the rest: Madrid.

MADRID. January 27, 2020: The Spanish capital has proven its “carsharing friendly” environment, especially thanks to recent measures taken by city officials. 

Shared Mobility Success

Following the methodology defined by Vulog’s consultants, we can easily conclude that Madrid scores high for each shared mobility success factor: dynamic city demographics and diverse structure with touristic and residential zones, business districts and university campuses, strong municipality support, plenty of existing mobility offers, a solid economic development with Madrid being Spain’s economic hub… and last but not least, a lot of sun all year round! For more details on Vulog’s methodology, make sure to read our report on “5 Great Up-and-Coming Cities for Carsharing”.

In 2018, Madrid led the way by enacting its municipal initiative, Madrid Central, which aims to reduce levels of nitrogen dioxide by banning older, fuel-inefficient cars. Now in 2020, all diesel and petrol cars are no longer allowed to enter the city center. The initiative also rewards those who adhere to their high environmental standards. For example, 100% electric vehicles can park for free in the city center with no time limit, and hybrid vehicles receive a 50% discount for 2 hours of parking.

These conditions propelled the rise of green carsharing companies, such as Emov and WiBLE, allowing people to access the city center with top-of-the-line sustainable vehicles. Madrid has since become one of the world’s most developed markets for shared mobility, with over 3,000 vehicles in operation across a selection of five carsharing providers within just four years. One in twelve Madrilians subscribes to one of the two leading carsharing providers: car2go and Emov.

Madrid is often described as a lab for new forms of mobility. For example, the IMOVE project, an initiative supported by the European Commission that explores common standards for digital mobility services, has selected Madrid as one of its five “Living Labs” due to the city’s plan to engage in MaaS development. More recently, the Spanish government announced measures to tackle climate change, including mandatory low-emission zones in large cities with over 50,000 inhabitants, expanding Madrid’s successful policy to other urban hubs across the country.

Here at Vulog, we see Madrid as the perfect place to hold our upcoming Mobility NeXT event on March 10th, 2020. This event series is dedicated to connecting the new mobility industry’s most influential leaders and forward-thinkers to share best practices and bring to life ideas that revolutionize the way we move in cities. We believe that the future of mobility is shared, electric and multimodal. But how do we make this happen together as one collective ecosystem?

Vulog is the world’s leading tech mobility provider: we are committed to building a greener future, one city at a time.