Saudi Gazette report

DAMMAM — Dr. Abdullah Al-Rubaish, president of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, launched the Smart Mobility initiative at the lobby of the College of Architecture and Planning on the university campus here on Wednesday.

The initiative, which was commissioned by the Deanship of Community Service and Sustainable Development, comes as part of using clean energy within the university campus and make available its health benefits to the members of the campus community.

Dr. Al-Rubaish said that the university launched the pilot phase of the smart mobility service so as to achieve the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 towards providing new opportunities for transportation.

“This is through generating clean energy within the university campus by bicycles and e-scooters with the WAYZ application, which will facilitate for its users the rapid mobility feature at the university through an electronic mobile application,” he added.

For her part, Dr. Fatima Bint Abdullah Al-Mulhim, head of the Deanship of Community Service and Sustainable Development, said that the new experiment is based on using clean energy for the mobility inside the university campus.

“We launched earlier the initiative of ‘Green University without Carbon,’ under which these scooters, which are charged and operated with solar energy will be used. It is a service available to all educational and administrative staffers of the university as well as to male and female students,” she said.

She noted that it has many health benefits, including the fight against obesity and the promotion of being environmentally friendly and serving the members of society with its environment.

According to Dr. Fatima, the goal is also to be sustainable through the presence of solar-powered stations.

“Today is the beginning of an experimental start and work is continuing in order to equip stations to charge these devices powered by solar energy.

“All the university people, including male and female students, administrators and members of the educational staff, as well as university security personnel, will benefit from this service.

This will facilitate their freedom of movement without cars, and the initiative received a lot of encouragement and demand,” she said while noting that safe corridors have been provided inside the university campus.

“This is one of our priorities to ensure the safety of the beneficiaries of this service, and it will be included in the first stage inside the university campus until the infrastructure and private roads are provided at the university for this type of initiative that is reflected in reducing the proportion of carbon.

“Now we are in the process of working with faculty members who obtained a patent in measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere, and we aim for the measurements and they will be returned according to the research scheme prepared for that,” she added.