Strategic Planning

Plans Are Easy, Change Is Hard. The EU Updates Its Planning Playbook

The EU has recently updated its guidance on Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP). "A Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan is a strategic plan designed to satisfy the mobility needs of people and businesses in cities and their surroundings for a better quality of life. It builds on existing planning practices and takes due consideration of integration, participation, and evaluation principles.”

Key Takeaways

• A Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan is based on the following principles:

1. Clear and measurable goals and objectives.
2. Long-term vision and a clear implementation plan.
3. Assessment of current and future performance.
4. Integrated development of all modes of transport while prioritising the most sustainable ones.
5. Integrated approach to passenger mobility and urban freight transport and logistics.
6. Participatory approach and coordination with other relevant initiatives.
7. Monitoring, review, reporting and quality assurance.
8. Guidance and support at European level.

• SUMP places particular emphasis on:
  • The involvement of citizens and stakeholders
  • The coordination of policies between sectors (especially transport, land use, environment, economic development, social policy, health, safety, and energy), and
  • Broad cooperation across different layers of government and with private actors.
• The concept also emphasises the need to plan for the entire functional city, rather than a single municipality within its administrative boundaries.

The SUMP process:

Phase 1: Preparation and analysis

• What are our resources?
• What is our planning context?
• What are our main problems and opportunities?

Phase 2: Strategy Development

• What are our options for the future?
• What kind of city do we want?

Phase 3: Measure Planning

• What will we do concretely?
• What will it take and who will do what?
• Are we ready to go?

Phase 4: Implementation and monitoring

• How can we manage well?
• How are we doing?
• What have we learned?

Comment

The SUMP process provides a good framework for planning. However, the challenge remains turning plans into actions and outcomes.

A review of the implementation of the SUMP in Copenhagen, a city which should provide fertile ground for SUMP success, still noted that "motorised traffic remains dominant".

Put simply, we are struggling to implement the policies that will significantly change our cities, probably because there is a big gap between politicians' virtue-signalling in their plans and the policies they are willing to take forward.

What Next?

Would your planning benefit from taking a SUMP approach?

Active Transport

England's New Active Travel Strategy: Big Targets, Small Budget

The UK has released its third cycling and walking investment strategy for England covering the period up to 2030.

Key Takeaways

• The strategy focuses on empowering local decision-making by delegating funds to local authorities.
• The strategy includes moving to a target for trip stages, recognising the need to integrate walking and cycling with other modes.
• Priorities include:
  • Building safe, coherent networks around schools.
  • Building regional capability so that local authorities have the skills, leadership and delivery confidence to deliver on the ground.
  • Conducting all the planning and mapping work for a proper national active travel network.
  • A £10 million Streets Innovation Fund to support trials of innovative measures intended to encourage active travel and improve road safety.
• Targets by 2035:
  • 60% of children aged 5 to 16 will usually walk or cycle to school.
  • Decrease fatalities and serious injuries per billion miles walked and cycled in line with the Road Safety Strategy targets.
  • Decrease percentage of people citing personal safety concerns when walking, wheeling and cycling.
  • 5.3 million more people being physically active through active travel, including inactive people.
  • 55% of all short stages in towns and cities to be walked or cycled, including 2.2 billion more short walking and 600 million more short cycling.
• Three strategic objectives:
  1. Enable more people, particularly the least active, to benefit from physical activity through active travel.
  2. Make active travel the easy and integrated choice
  3. Improve safety for people walking, wheeling and cycling

Progress on the delivery of the targets and objectives will be reported through statutory reports to Parliament.

• Funding available is estimated to be more than £4.5bn

Comment

There is a lot to like in this strategy. The focus on shorter trips is sensible, and the targets are clear and ambitious, with accountability enhanced by reports to Parliament.

However, the UK spends approaching £50bn per year on transport, so £4.5bn over 5 years is only around 2% of the transport budget, far below the 20% that Ireland has committed to.

Additionally, there is debate about whether the funds are real and whether they will actually be spent on active transport, so 2% may be optimistic.

It all feels like the targets will be missed, with a lot of excuses around increasing the budget in the latter years.

What Next?

Do you have both a high-quality strategy for active transport and the funding to deliver on it?

Micromobility

Try Before You Buy: How E-Cargo Bikes Could Cut Car Dependency in Car-Dependent Areas

The ELEVATE project was a comprehensive research programme examining the potential to expand the household use of e-bikes, e-cargo bikes and e-scooters by households in suburbs, towns and rural areas, where car dependency is high. An overview of the findings has recently been released.

Key Takeaways

• During trials of household e-cargo bikes, over half of the mileage ridden replaced car trips.
• After the trial, 20% of participants went on to buy a cargo bike, showing that ‘try before you buy’ schemes can encourage longer-term take-up.
• There was significant interest in ‘try before you buy’ loan schemes to encourage uptake:
  • 45% were interested in a free month-long e-bike loan, with a quarter interested in a cargo bike.
  • Just over half (52%) agreed that the Government should do more to support e-bike use.
• Some key barriers to increased e-bike use are cost, lack of parking facilities or cycling infrastructure, and concerns about vehicle theft.
• Research also found that e-cargo bikes help shift cycle culture from being seen as just a sporty activity mainly for men to something for everyone.

Key Recommendations:

• Run more trial schemes for both e-bikes and e-cargo bikes.
• Promote e-bikes widely
• Promote e-cargo bikes especially to households with a need for greater carrying capacity.
• Combine household promotion for e-bikes and e-cargo bikes with promotion for other local services, such as car club membership and bus season tickets.
• Provide secure e-bike, e-cargo bike and e-scooter parking and charging at common destinations and travel interchange points.
• Swap some on-street car parking spaces for on-street e-bike/e-cargo bike adapted cycle hangars.
• Ensure workplace regulations permit legal and safe e-bike/e-cargo bike charging.
• Make it easier for purchasers to identify whether their e-bike or e-cargo bike is safe and legal.
• Make road infrastructure safer for e-bikes, e-cargo bikes, e-scooters, pedestrians and cyclists.
• Design infrastructure to avoid conflicts between pedestrians and e-bikes, e-cargo bikes and e-scooters
• Ensure that any change to e-scooter regulations considers private and share scheme e-scooters.
• Offer grants for e-bike and e-cargo bike use where the benefit is not dependent on income.
• Consider schemes that improve access to e-bikes and e-cargo bikes alongside other policies to tackle vulnerability to motoring costs.
• Provide cycle training on demand.

Comment

The results from this research demonstrate significant potential to achieve a mode shift away from cars. The recommendation to run more trial schemes is a sensible way forward to see whether the results will scale.

What Next?

Are you running trial schemes for e-bikes and e-cargo bikes?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Small steps matter: the contribution of policy calibration to more sustainable mobility planning - Research examining the importance of ongoing policy calibration in delivering desired outcomes.
• ​Addressing Travel Needs of Women and Families on Public Transportation - Research looking at how public transport can better meet the needs of women and families.
• ​Bus network performance: passenger experience is the lead factor - An opinion piece arguing that we need to focus more on the passenger experience as a critical part of bus network performance.

Podcast

Barriers To Transport Reform

In this week's Transport Leaders podcast, we discussed the need for transport reform and what is holding it back.

👂 Listen here.

👀 Watch here.

Tool

Caltrans VMT Reduction Program

Caltrans (California's Department of Transportation) has released a new playbook for reducing Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT).