Over the last few months Wallonia has moved from the strategic vision of eHUBS deployment to preparing operational plans. As described in the last newsletter, eHUBS in Wallonia will be deployed in 5 cities that are working together under the lead of the AOT (the regional authority team organizing public transport in Wallonia). To achieve this, a new eHUBS project manager has started in December 2021 in the AOT team and is working since then with the 5 municipalities and the support of Mpact. One of the first actions was to finalize the location selection for the 15 eHUBS. (see picture: workshop with the 5 municipalities in February 2022). In total, the 5 municipalities have identified a potential network of +50 mobipoints based on research done by Mpact and their own knowledge of the area. A list of potential eHUBS has been prioritized from these +50 locations.
While we are now approaching potential shared electric mobility providers and organizing the legal framework ideally encompassing the 5 municipalities, it’s important to know that the Walloon Region has moved also to an operational phase of deploying intermodal nodes on the entire territory of Wallonia. The latter, by allocating a € 210 million envelope spread over the 262 Walloon cities to develop pedestrian and cycling paths and intermodal nodes (“mobipôles”) - link. The eHUBS project in Wallonia will benefit from this momentum around the intermodal nodes development in Wallonia which gives already confidence that replication will continue after the eHUBS project end in 2023.
