Good planning helps choosing and designing the right measures, or packages of measures, for a city’s particular transport context, and getting them off the ground.
A Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) – a strategic plan designed to satisfy the mobility needs of people and businesses in cities and their surroundings for a better quality of life - can play a big role in this regard. To discover more about these plans, visit the dedicated Mobility Plans section on Eltis.
Measuring the performance of an urban transport system is important for establishing measures and policies for improving its quality. This is particularly important in terms of improving the energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of transport.
Fewer and fewer children now play on the streets outside their houses, partly due to increased traffic. As many communities lack safe areas for children to play, run and cycle, this is having a negative impact on children's ability to make and maintain social contact and limits their opportunity to exercise.
The Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology has published a handbook of measures that can be employed to increase bicycle use. Individual measures are assessed in terms of cost, effort, impact and public acceptance. The document is only available in German.
See below to download the document.
Photo by ahans / CC BY-NC-SA
This guidance document addresses the need to make new building projects accessible to sustainable transport modes. It is primarily targeted at investors, developers and urban planners and focuses on the situation as it applies to the city of Graz (Austria). However, it can also apply to other cities and functions mainly as a best practice guide.
See below to download the document.
The links between access to attractive and safe public spaces and mental and physical health are becoming ever more apparent. The lack of such spaces can compound the problems which come with increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Moreover, communities with few or no safe and fun public spaces are more likely to be economically deprived ones, which already suffer from greater health inequalities.
During much of the 20th century, urban planning in Europe's cities and towns tended to prioritise space for cars over pedestrians, cyclists or public transport users. Inclusive street design can go a long way to reversing this imbalance in spatial planning, and can be applied equally to existing streets in need of redesigning as well as new developments.
Living Streets, a campaigning organisation that promotes walking, has produced a report reviewing the evidence for the benefits of investing in walkable public spaces. It presents successful case studies and arguments for convincing stakeholders to support walking, and draws on inspiring case studies of schemes which have resulted in safer and more attractive public places in neighbourhoods and city centres in the UK and elsewhere.
Land-use planning is key to the way we travel because it affects where the activities that we undertake are located and therefore how far, and in what ways, we travel between them. This material was developed for training and learning sessions in Eltis to show, using international examples, how denser and more mixed use development can reduce the need to travel and the amount of travel by car.
Parking space management (e.g. limited and paid parking in public spaces or in companies) are suitable measures to influence travel behaviour and to shift car trips to more sustainable modes of transport. This training material was used in Eltis training sessions in 2007 and looked at how car parking spaces - both on- and off-street - are managed in different European Member States and the effects of this on traffic flow, congestion and pollution.
