EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK News

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Amadora, Budapest and Innsbruck among finalists for European urban mobility awards

8 February 2024

Six finalists have been selected for the EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK and MOBILITYACTION awards. The awards place a spotlight on awareness-raising and mobility management in the area of sustainable urban mobility and are presented in recognition of activities conducted in 2023. Both winners will be announced at an award ceremony held in Brussels on 14 March.

The nominees for the EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK Award 2023 are:

Amadora (Portugal) for partnering with fellow local and regional authorities, including the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon, with brands like IKEA and Decathlon, and with Europe-wide campaigns, such as Kidical Mass, to promote walking, cycling and public transport. Activities and the launch of permanent measures (such as the creation of an inter-city cycle network) were broadcast on local television and radio stations, in addition to being widely shared on social media platforms.

Budapest (Hungary) for an ambitious car-free weekend (16 – 17 September), counting 10,000 participants and featuring activities for children and adults, and a Car-Free Day (22 September) during which the Mayor of Budapest revealed plans for the construction of a new, pedestrian-friendly car-free zone on the Danube embankment. Events on how to 'Save Energy' in the transport sector were also held, alongside close cooperation with the City of Vienna (Austria) to promote best practices in walking and cycling policies.

Innsbruck (Austria) for tackling the 2023 theme 'Save Energy' from all angles. The city promoted energy savings by allowing public transport subscription holders to travel with up to three friends, by hosting an event on the practical aspects of e-mobility, and by offering free rental of city bikes on World Car-Free Day. Innsbruck also focused on shifting space from cars to people by opening parking spaces for pedestrian use in a central square; the action was so popular that it was extended for several weeks.

The nominees for the MOBILITYACTION Award 2023 are:

GSK (Wavre, Belgium) for its comprehensive approach to mobility management, which offered replicable examples for other large employers, including 13 activities on sustainable urban mobility and mobility-conscious commuting. Examples included a car-pool “speed-dating” session; a bicycle maintenance service to ensure that employees are not forced to handle maintenance issues in their free time; and discussions with a representative of the National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB) on transport pass options for hybrid work.

Nahverkehrsgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg mbH (NVBW) (Germany) for empowering students across the entire state of Baden-Württemberg to travel to school safely and sustainably via the ‘MOVERS - Active to School’ programme. In 2023, MOVERS (which is supported by Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, and Ministry of the Interior) encouraged pupils to participate in a Germany-wide bike-to-school competition, in addition to supporting schools and municipalities with selected mobility measures.

Nudgd (Helsingborg, Sweden) for its innovative online platform leveraging behavioural science to encourage sustainable school travel habits in Helsingborg. Students, parents, and teachers were invited to join an online platform where they are gently “nudged” with messages, challenges, and quizzes to raise interest in - and show the benefits of - active travel. The platform supports the City of Helsingborg’s goals to enhance cycling, and promote safer, more sustainable travel by the parents/guardians of primary school students.

The EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK award recognises municipalities that have excelled in promoting sustainable urban mobility during the campaign’s main week of 16 - 22 September. Meanwhile, the MOBILITYACTION award was launched by the European Commission in 2022 to acknowledge excellence in mobility management planning solutions submitted by businesses, civil society organisations, institutions, or local administrations throughout 2023. The annual theme for both awards is ‘Save Energy.’

The shortlisted candidates were selected by an independent panel of mobility and transport experts. The two winners will be announced at an award ceremony at La Bellone (Brussels, Belgium) on 14 March 2024. Register for the ceremony here.

Cargo bike solutions from the City of Bremen

18 January 2024

Streets blocked by delivery vans and nowhere for cargo bikes to park: these are some of the daily reminders that European cities were not built for online shopping. Despite the heavy burden on logistics due to the increase in e-commerce, innovation in sustainable logistics is on the rise. According to leading sustainable logistics experts from the City of Bremen - a regular participant in EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK and one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in Germany, where around a quarter of its 570,000 inhabitants are everyday cyclists - there is room for manoeuvre.

Cycling infrastructure is essential

As underscored by the European Cycling Declaration, attractive and inclusive cycling infrastructure is key to improving sustainable transport in cities. Through the recent Urban Logistics as an On-Demand Service (ULaaDS) project, the City of Bremen has showcased how cycle-friendliness is essential to enable the shift from delivery vans to cargo bikes. Additionally, it is necessary for all parties to play their role in implementing and enforcing the given regulations. Loading zones, for example, really need to be available for loading, which is not always the case.

Effective communications for greater acceptance

A key finding for Bremen in its mission to transition to a cargo bike-friendly city, is to ensure effective and transparent communication with all stakeholders. Through surveys, the city was able to learn from the experience of the different parties, as well as by establishing a communications forum for representatives of public authorities, logistics and service providers, retailers, experts and other relevant parties. This has led to greater acceptance and understanding of the needs of each stakeholder group for sustainable solutions. As explained by Michael Glotz-Richter, Sustainable Mobility, City of Bremen:

“We have to deal here with a highly competitive market; […] we have to ensure we have a fair treatment of all market players […]to try to understand each other.”

Cargo bikes for households

The potential of cargo bikes for logistics doesn’t stop at e-commerce. A huge number of individual car trips are for household shopping purposes, which are often short distances and, therefore, have the greatest potential to be replaced by cargo bikes. According to a pilot scheme conducted in Bremen to test the potential impact of cargo bikes at the household level, respondents claimed that 55% of their cargo bike trips replaced what would otherwise have been a car journey.

Get inspired by the activities implemented by Bremen and other towns and cities during EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK 2023.

Learn more about the ULaaDS project here.

POLIS Annual Conference spotlights the importance of active mobility & shared urban space

11 December 2023

At the annual POLIS Conference hundreds of stakeholders gathered to discuss mobility solutions and initiatives with “active mobility for all” and the “reallocation of urban space” emerging as two key topics.

At the conference, which took place from 29 – 30 November in Leuven (Belgium), the need for a holistic approach to sustainable urban mobility was underlined. A presentation from Mobiel 21 highlighted active mobility’s key role in making mobility more inclusive: in the Flemish region of Belgium (Flanders), a network of “fiets scholen” or “bicycle schools” was created to offer people the opportunity to learn how to ride, repair, buy or rent a bike. Flanders is largely flat and quite densely populated, so cycling is often an inexpensive and effective solution to get from A to B. Not only is the bicycle an affordable solution for many, but by teaching people how to cycle safely the “fiets scholen” are able to include groups that might normally not feel comfortable cycling. In fact, of the over 1,000 people that the bike schools have taught to cycle, 90% of the participants were women and of these participants two-thirds belonged to lower income groups.

Cycling is a powerful tool to improve social inclusivity, especially among groups that have historically been sidelined in urban planning. The new EU Cycling Declaration highlights this point and lays out clear principles to make cycling infrastructure more inclusive and safer for everyone, including women, children and people with reduced mobility. The MOBILITYACTION Bicycle Heroes - Youth Voices for Active Mobility is another great example of active mobility offering a new perspective to urban mobility solutions. The initiative works with kids between the ages of 10 – 14 in Rome (Italy) to solve urban mobility challenges related to cycling. The action identifies barriers for cycling and smart design solutions to overcome these obstacles, which are then shared with the public.

Meanwhile, the reallocation of urban space surfaced as another important topic at the POLIS conference. Whether space is transferred from motor vehicles to cyclists through the creation of new bike paths or by increasing the pavement area, or the number of parking spaces are reduced to leave way for more greenery – every change has a direct impact on the mobility mix in towns and cities. A presentation from the German region of Baden-Württemberg proposed a new framework for inner cities with twenty towns and cities chosen as pilots. The participating cities were provided with a dedicated budget and expertise to support them in co-creating measures to restructure their centres. The reallocation of space in the centres was done using temporary street furniture and featured people-focused planning. Several of these plans are set to be permanently implemented in the near future.

Many cities and towns are taking the leap to reallocate urban space in favour of pedestrian use, road safety and ample greenery, including the prototype rearrangement of traffic at Miarki Street in Bytom (Poland), a recently registered MOBILITYACTION. The Polish city enhanced the space for pedestrians and cyclists while reducing the average speed of motor vehicles.

As 2023 comes to a close, the POLIS Conference spotlighted some of the most important mobility topics for 2024, including active mobility and shared urban space, among others. For more information on the conference click here.

For more information on MOBILITYACTIONS click here.

Improving quality of life through sustainable mobility: an interview with Mayor Ricardo Rio of Braga, winner of the EUROPEAN MOBILITY WEEK Award

6 December 2023

The Mayor of Braga (Portugal) Ricardo Rio understands that transforming shared urban space can elicit strong reactions. However, Braga’s longstanding commitment to advancing sustainable mobility is rooted in its desire to improve residents’ quality of life. As the most recent winner of the EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK Award, this Portuguese city is reducing pollution, improving quality of life, and increasing efficiency by expanding cycling infrastructure, opening streets for pedestrians, collaborating with local businesses, and engaging with community members to achieve these goals. We sat down with Mayor Rio to learn more about Braga’s sustainable mobility work.

Braga has been working to reduce surface parking (there are many underground parking lots) and the number of cars in the city centre to provide more space for cycling and pedestrian use. How did the public receive news of these plans at first? And how are they receiving it now that you have successfully implemented some changes?

Mayor Rio: It's challenging because obviously we are entering what we call the “comfort zone” of citizens. We are reducing the amount of parking spots. We are narrowing some streets and providing space for bike lanes or for buses. And the initial reaction is never good. There's an expression in Portugal that first you feel [something new] is strange and then you integrate it more in your current routines and you adapt, and that's what has been happening. Usually [at first], people complain if you go to neighbourhoods and you are trying to improve, for instance, the public space, which is a major advantage for the citizens that live there because they will have more security for their kids to play, for them to walk around, to promenade. But, at the same time, we are reducing the parking slots and they always complain. It’s a common reaction that we are seeing worldwide and I have been discussing this with a lot of Mayors in Europe actually. It’s quite curious because I've seen a couple of cities in which they had very aggressive mobility policies and they lost elections. So, we need to also be balanced in the way that we do this strategy. We can’t make a revolution from one day to the other, and we have to create this awareness that we are really improving the quality of life. Because when we are reducing pollution, when we are creating more sustainable means of transport, we are providing better quality of life, better public health for our citizens and I think that it's a work in progress. People adapt and people get more conscious. The youngsters obviously become more conscious and that's why we work a lot with kids, with schools, and with universities.

Raising awareness is a big part of change. Speaking of which, last year Braga won the EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK award for its sustainable mobility awareness-raising efforts during the main event week (16 - 22 September). What did you learn from the activities organised last year and what did you focus on in 2023?

Mayor Rio: Well, we have been building on the past initiatives that granted us this very important prize. I think that this type of prize is also very important because it shows people that we are aligned. It's not a crazy mayor or counsellor who decides to make this type of revolution. We have a global trend that is being implemented. We have the recognition for the quality of the work that we are doing, and that's also important to create momentum and to strengthen further initiatives that we can develop. And so, this year's programme was mostly aligned with last year. We always bring innovative actions, but the major focus of the Mobility Week here in Braga was always the engagement of the community and to bring all the people, the citizens, and the institutions together, sometimes experimenting with new ways.

For instance, we decided to start creating - and that's an initiative that we have been repeating every single year - a night ride of bikes in the centre of the city. It's a leisure activity, of course, but it's also a way to show that we have the opportunity to do that on a regular basis. When we create, for example, opportunities for the use of public transportat people usually only have this opportunity during big events in the city, like park and ride solutions to leave the cars outside [the city] and then come to the centre by bus. But they don't do it on a regular basis, so it's obviously important to create some habits and to show that it’s a great solution.

During last year’s EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK you also launched a bike sharing scheme and now the European Union has released its own Cycling Declaration. Do you have plans to further expand Braga’s cycling infrastructure?

Mayor Rio: Yes. We are investing a lot in cycling infrastructure. We have the aim of having around 70 kilometres of bike lanes, either dedicated lanes or coexisting lanes in the city. All the new interventions that we made recently...include the creation of bike lanes. For instance, we are now having a huge intervention in the centre of the city, which is creating a lot of traffic constraints right now, but one of the solutions that we are implementing is the creation of a bike lane that will connect to other already existing bike lanes and more leisure bike lanes by the river and then in other zones. We want to create a network of bike lanes in the city that allows anyone to use the bike as a solution for their mobility in the territory.

And one thing that I didn't mention yet, which is really very important and very connected with all the things that we have been doing, is one of the new events that we had in this year's Mobility Week: the creation of what we called the Business Sustainable Mobility Pact, which is an informal network of institutions of business and public institutions that have become supporters of more sustainable mobility. We have worked with the Business Council for Sustainable Development, which is a national institution, and each of the organisations has an inventory of compromises that they can make which are connected to improved sustainable mobility; some cycle to their offices or offer parking lots for bikes, others provide access to public transport. Meanwhile, others create bike-sharing or car-sharing systems for their workers. This is something that is very interesting because we have over 14 institutions right now that are committed and that belong to this Pact, and we are talking about the biggest employers in the city. We are talking about the university, the hospital, et cetera. Altogether we have around twenty-five thousand people who are already covered by this initiative.

One of the reasons Braga’s work on sustainable mobility stands out is because of its successful cooperation with actors from different sectors. Did you feel that the businesses and institutions you approached were receptive to improving sustainable mobility?

Mayor Rio: Yes, definitely. Actually, for many reasons. The way that the city was structured, it's not only a matter of pollution, it's also a matter of efficiency. It's a matter of quality of life. If you are, for instance, the owner of a company and you listen to your workers complaining about the time they spend in traffic, you obviously want to contribute to a better solution and to create these types of initiatives that we provide through the Pact. It's a way for them to help overall. It's like we are not changing the world, but we are changing our own world and we are contributing to a global change, and that's what's happening here. I think that we had very good reception, for instance, when the public transport company developed a lot of initiatives with the local companies and with the main institutions. It's very common to see [the public transport company] in a branch of the hospital trying to convince new people to subscribe to the public transport passes. It's something that we do on a regular basis and that we try to strengthen a little bit throughout the [Mobility] week.

For more information on Braga's award-winning actions, take a look at this short video.
For more information on EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK 2023, check out our participation page.

EUROPEAN MOBILITY WEEK 2023 enjoyed record breaking participation

8 November 2023

In 2023, EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK broke its record for campaign participation, with 3,351 towns and cities registering activities to raise awareness about sustainable and active mobility from 16 - 22 September.

Towns and cities from 45 countries in Europe, and beyond, participated during the main event week, including Argentina, Ecuador, Japan, Mexico, Peru, and South Korea. As usual, local authorities used the week to test innovative planning measures, promote new infrastructure and technology, measure air quality and noise pollution, and get feedback from the public. Participating towns and cities - both old and new alike - joined an international community of local and regional authorities, organisations and people committed to encouraging behavioural change in favour of sustainable and active mobility.

Returning cities Dublin and Brussels organised a wide range of activities, such as the “Great Dublin Bike Ride” and “Bike Disco” to encourage Dubliners to travel by bike instead of by car and Car-Free Sunday in Brussels which, according to Mobiel 21, saw an estimated 1.2 million people enjoy the initiative in the capital. A Clean Cities Campaign survey among Brussels residents showed that almost 60% are in favour of having a car-free day once a week.

Alongside returning participants, new towns and cities, like Valença (Portugal) which organised a car-free day featuring activities to raise awareness about emissions and road safety for cyclists, joined the campaign for the first time.

This year, the focus was on saving energy. Energy and mobility poverty levels continue to rise due to high costs for residents and businesses across Europe, while operating public transport remains a large expense for city budgets. Reducing these expenses through energy-efficient transport will support affordable and sustainable transport infrastructures. Following Russia's unwarranted invasion of Ukraine, it is also crucial to reduce dependency on Russian oil and to shift to sustainable energy sources, which will simultaneously move Europe toward a climate-neutral future by 2050.

In addition to EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK’s record-breaking participation, over 860 brand-new MOBILITYACTIONs have been registered so far in 2023. The campaign’s answer to highlighting the growing importance of mobility management, MOBILITYACTIONs promote behavioural shifts toward a sustainable urban mobility culture and can be registered by NGOs, schools, companies, and local authorities. Notable actions from 2023 include a collaboration between Rome, Dublin and Lisbon to engage with children between the ages of 10 - 14 to solve urban mobility challenges related to cycling through the Bicycle Heroes project and the BikeToWork: Paris La Défense initiative, a two-day event organised by the local authorities of Paris La Défense and Mobility Makers targeting 180,000 employees.

For more information on towns’ and cities’ activities visit the Participating towns and cities page.

Learn more about this year’s MOBILITYACTIONs here.