The “Talk series – Porto Towards Carbon Neutrality 2030” is an initiative organized by the Porto City Council, which includes 10 sessions of clarification and debate related to the theme of sustainability and decarbonization. The second session took place last Thursday, May 11th, at the Porto Innovation Hub and had “Sustainable Mobility” as its theme.

Teresa Stanislau, Member of the Management Board of STCP Services, was the moderator of the event, which was attended by Carlos Abreu, Director of the STCP Fleet Maintenance Unit; Fabrizio Curtale, Director of Bird Portugal; and Francisco Travassos, Director of Express and Logistics at CTT and CEO of Locky.

Each of the speakers was entitled to an intervention, followed by a clarification space with the audience present at the Porto Innovation Hub.

“As a city, it is important to understand the challenges that arise in the field of mobility. And there are two vectors here: technology, infrastructure and fleets, and on the other hand, people’s habits. We cannot just develop infrastructure and technology and not encourage the change of habits,” began Teresa Stanislau, setting the tone for the start of the event.

The role of STCP in the transition to sustainable mobility

The STCP manages the bus network in the municipality of Porto and also several lines in municipalities of Greater Porto, which means it has considerable weight regarding the transition to sustainable mobility in the municipality. But what has it been doing in this sense?

Carlos Abreu, Director of the STCP Fleet Maintenance Unit, started his intervention by explaining that the company has 420 buses, with the vast majority powered by natural gas (333), 67 are diesel-powered and 20 are electric.

The modernization of the STCP bus fleet began in 2018 and spread until 2022, at which time the company chose to acquire higher quality vehicles powered by natural gas. Now, from this year on, Carlos Abreu revealed that all vehicles that will be purchased by STCP “will already be vehicles with zero emissions.” Then, from 2028 to 2040, the “replacement of all cars with carbon emissions” is expected.

“These four years were the experimentation phase. We made two acquisitions of electric buses – one of 15 units and another of 5 units – and we have been following the evolution of the vehicles because initially, in 2018, the cars did not have the necessary capacity to meet our operational needs. They had little autonomy, but that was changing,” he explained.

The STCP manager also revealed that, for this year, they have planned and contracted a supply of 48 electric buses. “These already have enough capacity to operate on any STCP line. We expect that, by 2027, all diesel buses and some of the natural gas buses (about 80) will be replaced by electric buses.”

The goal, according to Carlos Abreu, is to reach 2027 with almost half of the buses running on natural gas and the other half electric. “For the next decade, the goal will be to eliminate natural gas buses and only have electric vehicles,” he said.

The impact of soft mobility

“Our mission is to make cities more sustainable. Many trips that are made by car could be replaced by scooter trips. In this way, we would reduce the number of cars in the city, the traffic and make mobility more sustainable,” began Fabrizio Curtale, Director of Bird Portugal.

Bird is a pioneering company in soft micro-mobility, which creates its own scooters and has a whole network of bicycles and electric scooters in the country and, more specifically, in Porto. “We estimate that, in Porto, there are, every year, 286 million car trips, of which 168 are short trips, which could be done by scooters. If we could convert 7 million of these trips to micro-mobility, this would mean having 1000 fewer cars per day, which translates into a saving of six tons of CO2 per day,” he said.

Even so, the person responsible for Bird confesses that “this is a process” and even gave the example of the car to understand that, from the creation of a new mobility solution until its effective mass adoption can take time: “The car took 60/70 years to be used massively because of challenges. The challenges for scooters are the few bike lanes and the infrastructure is very important for this.”

On the other hand, Fabrizio Curtale also mentioned the fact that users find the service expensive as a hurdle. However, he also explained that if the cost of a car per kilometer were calculated, it would be easier to understand that the cost of scooters is not that expensive. “The use of the car is 0.50 cents to 0.80 cents per kilometer, while in Porto the scooter is 0.20 cents per kilometer and, if you join the monthly pass, it is 0.10 cents,” he said.

The new mobility solutions for e-commerce

Home deliveries of e-commerce orders end up being another concern for the city’s sustainable mobility, which has already implemented solutions in this regard, aiming to have common delivery points, instead of promoting house-to-house delivery. How does this work? Through a system of lockers, strategically located, both in centers and in shopping malls, supermarkets, and other busier locations, where you can leave orders that will later be picked up by interested parties.

Francisco Travassos, Director of Express and Logistics at CTT and CEO of Locky, explained that Locky is a network of lockers to receive orders: “The idea is that this network is dense and with a convenient schedule. This is because, until this solution was implemented, the alternative to not receiving orders at home were the CTT stores or kiosks, which always have a limited schedule and queues. The idea of Locky was to create a convenient and alternative network to this”.

To use this system, all you need to do is go to a locker, enter the PIN you received via SMS on the machine, and it opens. “As they are aggregation points for orders, there are fewer trips, there is less pollution in the city”, he continued.

Although it is a more sustainable option, some people still have some reluctance to adopt this solution due to the issue of vandalism. However, Francisco Travassos explained that there has been a very low number of vandalism since they installed the lockers, and in none of the few cases, they managed to steal orders. Even so, the CEO of Locky assured that all orders are insured: “We have insurance for the lockers and what’s inside. The goods are insured”.

So far, more than 600 Locky lockers have been installed throughout the country, but Francisco Travassos revealed that they intend to reach 1000 by the end of this year.