EU Action Plan on Urban Transport

Urban transport has an important role in creating growth and employment in Europe. It has also a large impact on the environment and the climate change and the problems and the capability to change these negative trends with the local governments. Therefore the European Commission introduced the Green Paper on urban mobility to address these. The Green Paper "Towards a new culture for urban mobility" was released on the 25 September 2007 by the European Commission after an extensive consultation period with a vast number of stakeholders in Europe.

As a follow up on the Green Paper the Commission has issued a consultation that will lead up to an Action Plan for urban mobility. The consultation is open to everyone and it will close in the end of March 2008 (see the web address below). UBC will compile an input to the consultation building on the experiences from the Commission on Transport, the experiences from the BUSTRIP project and its member cities. This builds on an informal meeting that was held between the BUSTRIP project and the DG Transport and Energy's unit on Clean Urban Transport, the unit responsible for the Green Paper process.

At the informal meeting in DG Transport and Energy, the concrete results from the BUSTRIP and its sister project PILOT were presented. Challenges and successes that the cities experience in working with Sustainable Urban Transport Plans (SUTP) were presented by the project teams from UBC, Chalmers and POLIS organisation. The SUTP concept enables the city to work in an integrated and cooperative way with mobility challenges.

The key points presented by the two projects were that Sustainable Urban Transport Plans are a good framework when taking a comprehensive grip on the urban transport challenges. It ensures that the city will not have any reverse effects due to the fact that the transport solutions are treated separately from the rest of the city's planning and administration. The concept also enables cities to work with the stakeholders that are the ones making the mobility choices. The two projects suggested that the SUTP concept should be included in the action plan and it could also be a prerequisite for funding administrated by the DG Tren.

A common statement for the UBC to the Green Paper follow up process is under development. We strongly encourage that UBC members feed in their experiences and ideas for what should be part of the European Agenda for Urban Transport. What support and facilitation do cities need? What are the challenges for cities?