Electric goods delivery vehicles will be able to unload at night in areas where neighbors will not be disturbed and where times of rarely used loading and unloading points will be arranged so that residents can park. These new measures are part of the update of the Urban Goods Distribution Strategy (DUM) and They will be activated in “the coming months”as reported by the municipal area of Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility. The DUM strategy was approved in 2022 and is linked to the Madrid 360 environmental strategy and the Sustainable Mobility Ordinance (WHO).
Concretely, with this new update, Madrid will allow electric trucks to distribute from 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. in parts of the city without affecting residents. They thus seek to “reduce logistical pressure during office hours” and thus alleviate traffic in the city during the day and encourage delivery vehicles to switch to electric vehicles. In addition, it will serve as an experiment to test “sustainable and silent logistics”, according to these Cibeles sources.
Another measure of updating consists of changes in the schedules of certain Rarely used loading and unloading spaces. Mobility points out that a high percentage of these locations currently have split hours from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. which “generates inefficiencies since more and more companies have continuous schedules”, they justify. For this reason, they propose eliminating the afternoon hours or reducing them to dedicate the space to general parking.
Convert loading and unloading into spaces for neighbors
The measure to reduce loading and unloading will be applied “after carefully analyzing each case, particularly in areas with a high presence of restaurants” in order not to hinder activity. With this, the Town Hall seeks to reallocate public space to more necessary uses depending on the urban context of each case, to reduce noise in residential areas, reduce parking search time for neighbors and improve route planning by urban freight distribution professionals.
To initiate these two measures, the Town Hall carried out an analysis of the actions undertaken in 2022 with the launch of the DUM. This study determined that the distribution of goods currently represents 11% of circulation, generates 6% of Madrid’s GDP and employs 120,000 people. He also represented 45,000 loading and unloading operations per day and this contributes to 28.4% of nitrogen oxide emissions and 16.9% of carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector.
Vehicle change assistance and the DUM “app”
For this reason, they seek to promote the transition from polluting vehicles to electric vehicles which, according to data from said area, since the approval of the DUM, the use of commercial vehicles without a sticker has been reduced by 73% and that of vehicles with environmental sticker B has been reduced by 73%, while Zero Emission vehicles have increased by 71% and ECO vehicles by 25%. As an incentive, they will be able to distribute at night, but in 2026, the Town Hall will again allocate an aid envelope similar to that of 2025, year in which they were awarded 1,150,000 euros to help businessmen change cars.
Regarding loading and unloading, spaces have increased by 8% since 2022, going from 8,239 spaces to 8,938. Furthermore, almost half of the capital’s businesses have one of these spaces less than 75 meters from their establishment. In this same study, an evaluation of the Madrid DUM 360 application is also presented, in which distribution professionals can manage loading and unloading of goods. Since its launch in 2022, an average of 2.5 operations have been carried out per day by 131,000 users and, in total, 11.5 million in three years.
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