A Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan
is embedded in a wider regional and national planning framework. This includes for example regulations, funding streams or higher level strategies for spatial and transport development (e.g. a national transport plan, where one exists). It is crucial to assess the impact of the regional and national planning framework to exploit opportunities and avoid conflicts with higher level authorities at a later point.
A SUMP should cover the functional urban area (i.e. travel-to-work area), which in most cases goes beyond the administrative boundaries of a municipality. If no regional or national regulations for the geographic scope of a SUMP exist, the most suitable spatial coverage needs to be agreed by the stakeholders concerned and approved by the political body. On the one hand, this depends on the area for which the respective local or regional authorities are responsible. But on the other hand, it must follow the actual mobility patterns as much as possible. A plan that covers the entire urban agglomeration will be much more effective than one that only covers parts of it.
Tasks
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Ensure that relevant regional, national and European legal requirements for the SUMP are identified.
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Gain a clear perspective on how the regional, national and European framework will influence the planning process.
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Define the geographic scope of your plan, usually covering the functional urban area of actual mobility patterns (e.g. travel-to-work area).
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Identify the appropriate body/bodies to take leadership in the planning process.
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Obtain a political decision to approve the geographic scope and the lead organisation.
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Ensure that the connection to long-distance transport corridors is considered.
Aims
Planning requirements
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Identify, document and assess:
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Legal regulations and guidance on how to develop a SUMP, including potential requirements for the geographic scope or the responsibilities of different types of planning authorities (if any).
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Relevant regional and national funding criteria.
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Higher-level plans, strategies, and objectives that might influence your SUMP. For example, the plans of a National Road Authority for new or enlarged roads could work against the objectives of a SUMP by encouraging more car driving into the city.
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Create a summary of the regional and national framework with suggestions on how to address it in your SUMP.
Geographic scope
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Analyse transport patterns and administrative boundaries. Define your functional urban area (see tool section below for more guidance). Include also links to long-distance transport corridors (such as the Trans-European Transport Network, TEN-T, national railway network).
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Involve key stakeholders and authorities within the envisaged planning area and strive for formal agreements on the geographic scope of planning activities.
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Take an open and transparent approach, securing the involvement of the authorities concerned. Ensure regular communication and exchange between relevant authorities.
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Negotiate overall responsibility for the plan.
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If it is not possible to define a planning area that is fully consistent with the functional urban mobility area, at least strive for good cooperation with actors on challenges that can only be dealt with at the agglomeration level. This can build on existing cooperation or involve new practices (e.g. formal procedures, such as joint land-use plans, or informal procedures, such as working groups).
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Ensure the representation of stakeholders from the entire planning area in the steering group.
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Ensure the involvement of citizens from the entire planning area in participation activities.
Activities beyond essential requirements
Timing and coordination
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Identify regulations and relevant planning requirements at the very beginning and consider these throughout the whole process.
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Take these particularly into account when defining stakeholder and citizen involvement (see Activity 1.4), the geographic scope (this activity), links with other planning processes (see Activity 2.2) and the timing and work plan (see Activity 2.3).
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Define geographic scope early so that it is taken into account when setting up the working and participation structures (see Step 1) – a clear agreement is required before initiating the official Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning Process (see Activity 2.3).
Checklist
✔ Relevant national and regional documents reviewed and results summarised.
✔ Opportunities and impacts identified that might result from the regional and national framework.
✔ Geographic scopes defined (if possible, the functional urban area).
✔ Political agreement achieved on geographic scope, basic roles and responsibilities of authorities and politicians.
✔ Key authorities from the planning area included in the core team and/or steering group.
✔ Political agreement signed and adopted by municipal councils.
Functional urban areas in EU Member States
The OECD and the European Commission have jointly developed a methodology to define functional urban areas (FUAs) in a consistent way across countries. Using population density and travel-to-work flows as key information, a FUA consists of a densely inhabited city and of a surrounding area (commuting zone) whose labour market is highly integrated with the city.
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The urban core consists of a population cluster with a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants per km².
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A municipality is part of the urban core if at least 50% of its population lives in the cluster.
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The ‘hinterland’ is identified as the ‘worker catchment area’ of the urban labour market, outside the densely inhabited core. All municipalities having at least 15% of their employed residents working in a certain urban core are defined to be part of the urban hinterland.
The ultimate aim of the OECD-EU approach to functional urban areas is to create a harmonised definition of cities and their areas of influence for international comparisons as well as for policy analysis on topics related to urban development.
The OECD offers profiles of the functional urban areas of each EU country. They include a map of the country with all functional urban areas (also available as a free shapefile), a list of the functional urban areas by population size and the population living in those functional urban areas. To access the profiles, please go to www.oecd.org and search for ‘functional urban area’.
Source: OECD 2019
Based on the common OECD-EU methodology, metropolitan regions are defined as contiguous, dense and built-up functional urban areas with at least 250,000 inhabitants. They tend to have a high economic attractiveness, large commuter flows and complex multi-modal transport systems, while typically also being transport nodes of national and European importance. Metropolitan regions can be particularly challenging for Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning due to the many affected municipalities and other institutions.
The Topic Guide Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning in metropolitan regions provides guidance for SUMPs at the metropolitan scale. It identifies four types of metropolitan governance (informal/soft coordination; inter-municipal authorities; supra-municipal authorities; special status metropolitan cities) and recommends examples and planning principles for the different institutional set-ups.
There are various types of functional urban areas with different needs for SUMP development. The Poly-SUMP Methodology offers guidance for polycentric regions with several municipalities or cities that are closely dependent on each other. It gives recommendations on how to initiate or develop regional transport cooperation in such complex areas. Based on the terminology of the Poly-SUMP guide, polycentric regions feature a capital city with a relatively low population (fewer than 200,000 in a larger region or fewer than 100,000 inhabitants in a smaller region) and a number of intermediate poles, smaller than the capital city, but greater than 5,000 inhabitants.
Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning can be as effective for small cities as for metropolitan regions, but small cities show different needs than larger ones and usually have very limited capacities for strategic planning. The Topic Guide on Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning in smaller cities (due for publication in 2020), adapts the SUMP process to the planning realities of smaller cities. It offers guidance both for cities that want to develop their own SUMP and for those who want to be part of a regional SUMP that was initiated by a nearby bigger city. In addition to planning tools and participation methods that have proven to work well in their context, the guide particularly focuses on measures that fit smaller cities with strong car-dependency and weak public transport.
