Yordanka Fandakova, Mayor of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, spoke for the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) on Sunday, touching upon main issues.
“Sofia is part of the network of big cities in Europe and worldwide,” she said.
“We are not such a big city but are an important part of this network. It was not accidental the event was called “historic” by French President François Hollande and Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, which initiated it, because we, mayors, have for the first time taken part in a common conference aimed at the fight against climate change,” Ms Fandakova stated.
She noted Sofia Municipality had been working on these subjects for several years.
“Sofia joined the network of European cities in 2011. Since 2012, we have had a programme, which we have been implementing through big ecological projects and all the rest of things in this direction. The meeting was important as clearly voiced our demand of national governments, countries, and world leaders for agreements to be reached,” Ms Fandakova stated.
In her words, their responsibility over the future is great.
The mayor added Sofia had undertaken its commitments.
“Cities are a highly important factor in the matter of climate change as we have operational tasks at a local level,” the municipal head commented.
She recalled the biggest ecological facility in Bulgaria had been built this year – the waste treatment installations that were to recycle over 50% of the waste of the big city and produce electricity and compost from large part of the rest of waste.
“Our public transport projects, the replacement [of old vehicles] with green ones, and the construction of the metro in particular have already produced their effect,” Yordanka Fandakova went on to say.
“The replacement of 90% of trolleybuses, which is already a fact in Sofia, has reduced energy consumption by 15%. We expect harmful emissions in Sofia to be cut by 90 tonnes annually due to the new project for a third metro line,” Ms Fandakova commented.
“This is a leading thing for me. I planned green policies in each sphere in my programme. This was also the responsible position of all my colleagues,” the municipal head stated further.
In her words, Sofia has a really unenviable place among European capitals and this is so due to the fact the ecologic measures, the implementation of which has been underway for several years only, produce a result slowly.
“We cannot make up for that so fast but it is important to have concrete goals and measure what has been achieved,” the mayor remarked.
“What we have planned is cutting harmful emissions by 25% by 2030. I will provide concrete examples – we started to replace street lighting and realised part of the pilot project, which will continue. Solely the replacement of 8,000 light fixtures has significantly decreased the consumption of energy, which is the important goal, but also expenditures,” Yordanka Fandakova added.
“We have been working for years, following very serious analyses and calculations, in particular regarding public transport in Sofia,” she pointed out further.
“It is a fact the price of metro tickets in Sofia is lowest among the prices in European capitals. Of course, the standards are quite different but this is a different subject. A price is a price and is calculated by experts. We do very intensive work on the introduction of an entire ticket system, which is to stimulate people to travel with the required documents, if we wish to draw comparisons to the rest of European capitals,” Ms Fandakova noted.
In her view, people should be stimulated at this stage to purchase cards to travel with.
Yordanka Fandakova explained it was a practice in Europe for the price of single-trip tickets to be high in contrast to the rest of transport documents making travelling accessible.
The mayor said it was planned for the Sofia Urban Mobility Centre to announce within weeks a procedure for the development of a ticket system, which was to allow a more modern tariff system in public transport in Sofia.