CIVITAS discusses sustainable urban mobility solutions at TRA
Image by Andreas Piller, ICLEI Europe
Last week, CIVITAS Initiative Coordinator, Andreas Piller, attended the Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2024 Conference, which took place in Dublin, Ireland. As a panelist in the session ‘Special Session 1.5: Sustainable Urban Mobility Solutions for Climate-neutral and Smart Cities’, he focussed on inclusivity and knowledge-sharing for systemic change.
During the session, he explained how CIVITAS helps deliver the systemic change needed to achieve climate-neutral cities at the level of the city and the urban mobility community. For the city scale, he offered as good examples the school area safety improvements planned in Lyon and Utrecht as part of a CIVITAS project, REALLOCATE. By piloting multifaceted measures in multiple schools, they will generate impactful results they can scale up across their own cities and serve as examples for others to replicate. For the broader community scale, Andreas emphasised that the change needed to meet the Mission's 2030 target would only be possible if cities across Europe stand on the shoulders of their peers, reapplying lessons already learned. Knowledge exchange facilitated by CIVITAS – among projects, cities, practitioners, politicians, academia, and industry – helps build capacity and expedite progress.
Andreas agreed with other speakers that inclusivity – in process and outcomes – is critical to successful deployment and sustaining public and political support. Public participation and co-creation are central to the ethos of the Initiative, woven into the fabric of its projects, and the focus of the 2024 CIVITAS Summer Course in Zagreb.
Finally, reacting to the keynote comments from Octavia Stepan, the Head of sector at CINEA, about integrating transport and land use planning, he suggested that a shift in practice is required from a mobility-based to an access-based perspective. Liveable cities are those where proximity, infrastructure, and services are mutually reinforcing – ensuring people can access the places they want to go by sustainable modes in a reasonable amount of time. In cities with supportive land use, CIVITAS projects help unlock the potential of proximity with multimodal streets and services.
The Transport Research Arena, is one of the key European transport events, focussing on European research and technology. The theme for TRA2024 was “Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility”.
