All Brussels car parks must provide EV charging by 2025
The Brussels regional government has decreed that all car parks in and around the Belgian capital region with ten parking spaces or more must offer charge points for electric cars from 2025. How many depends on the size of the car park and will gradually increase until 2030.
According to a report in the Brussels Times, the government decided that by 2025, office car parks will have to provide at least ten per cent of parking spaces with recharging facilities by 1 January 2025 and 20% by 1 January 2030. Brussels set this quota for public car parks at 5% by 2025 and 10% by 2030.
Alain Maron, Brussels Minister for Climate Transition and the Environment, said the government was “committed to supporting the people of Brussels in their switch to electric vehicles by offering more and more charging stations in all districts. With this decree, we will offer more charging points in car parks so that everyone has an easily accessible charging solution.”
Indeed, the Brussels government has been committed for some time and first decided to push for charging points for electric vehicles in 2020. Yet, the city is a long way off the target to have 22,000 public charge points by 2035 – 20,000 more than are currently available.
Brussels, therefore, tried to cut regulatory red tape in 2021 to facilitate the installation of charging stations in public and private car parks. The aim was to shorten the time between application and approval from six to two months. Already then, Brussels was planning to release a new decree to stipulate which buildings would have to provide how many charging points in their parking spaces, although safety regulation issues remained.
The 11,000 charging stations with two plugs each by 2035 are just one of several decarbonisation measures. In 2018, Brussels introduced a Low Emission Zone that keeps out old diesel (Euro 0-3) and petrol (Euro 0-1) vehicles. The Brussels regional government wants to ban diesel vehicles from 2030 and petrol vehicles from 2035. The city is therefore investing in public transport and measures to encourage walking and cycling.
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