Leonie van den Beuken, Program Director of Amsterdam Smart City, is announced as the new chairwoman of the Vereniging Elektrische Rijders starting April 1. She will voluntarily fulfill her role as chairwoman in addition to her job as Program Director of Amsterdam Smart City. The Vereniging Elektrische Rijders (VER) represents the electric driver and serves as an independent source of information for (future) electric drivers. The VER increasingly contributes to the debate and implementation of the further electrification of the Netherlands, at national and regional, but also at local level. Leonie will play an important role in this. She considers her new position as a good challenge: ''Electric driving is better for our climate, ensures better livability of cities and villages and is also comfortable. However, electric vehicles are still far from being available to everyone. Building on the fantastic foundation the VER has laid, I am going to make every effort to accelerate the move towards cleaner mobility with a special focus on making it affordable and even more sustainable. For example, through shared mobility and innovating on more sustainable technology''
Leonie succeeds Koos Burgman, who was committed to the VER for the past five years and has helped the organisation grow to where it is today in an outstanding way. The VER has almost 10,000 members, more than 500 volunteers and almost 80 ambassadors and is growing steadily.
For more information about the VER and their mission, visit their website on: https://www.evrijders.nl/
Dear Leonie, what is your opinion on smart and light electric vehicles, do you see those having a future in Amsterdam? Kind regards.
Hi, a possible solution to this problem is to allow LEV's in Amsterdam, studies are made for this, e.g. https://leva-eu.com/44-57-million-tonnes-co2-eq-per-year/
Congratulations Leonie! I hope however that it is not the literal aim of VER to migrate all fossil fuel cars to electric cars, and make them available to everyone?! One because electric cars also have a large footprint, maybe not as big as fossil fuel cars, but still, the downsides of electric cars are becoming more clear every day. Second because our cities are literally dominated by cars! We don't need more electric car drivers, but more car-less drivers, so pedestrians and cyclists can start living again in our cities!