Learning Centre

Urban freight transport and city logistics are very important elements of urban mobility, however they are often disregarded by city planners and our objective is to provide knowledge as well as best practices and solutions for this key area of city and transport planning.

In the face of urban traffic congestion, traffic pollution, carbon emissions and high energy consumption, more and more cities turn to public transport. Under the condition of limited urban space and increasing urban population in cities in emerging countries, optimisation of public transport becomes important. SOLUTIONS will focus on tested public transport solutions related to Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Asia and Latin America, trolley buses in Europe, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in Singapore and public transport operations

Sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) aims to support local authorities to plan and manage urban mobility more efficiently and fairly. With a focus on people, accessibility for all sectors of society and quality of life, this new planning paradigm is interdisciplinary and looks beyond geographical and institutional boundaries. This can be achieved by considering the local circumstances and needs and involving a wide range of stakeholders and the engagement of citizens in the decision making and planning process. In SOLUTIONS, leading cities will transfer their knowledge and experiences to take-up cities world-wide. For example, SOLUTIONS partner EMBARQ has already started to ‘tropicalize’ the EU guidelines for the Brazilian context, where sustainable urban mobility planning has become mandatory for cities. SOLUTIONS will provide take-up cities with practical experiences, training activities, study tours and practical exchange. The aim is to enable cities to start and implement SUMPs according to their local circumstances and to assist cities to make their cities economically robust, improve their environmental conditions and the make the city a liveable place for all citizens.

SOLUTIONS will focus on infrastructure for public transport (tramways, bus lanes, passenger waiting and boarding areas), infrastructure for soft modes (e.g. cycle routes, pedestrian facilities) and infrastructure for urban freight systems. Quality passenger transport is highly dependent on improved infrastructure whilst continued efficient operations are reliant on adequate and timely maintenance. This element will also include better sharing of road-space between guided vehicles (e.g. trams and guided buses) and bus lanes as well as separate dedicated public transport routes. With respect to walking and cycling, easy substitutes for trips of less than 5 kilometers, improvements in infrastructure quality and safety, design of cycle ways and pavements, parking spaces for bicycles, and more will be addressed. Freight transport infrastructure issues to be considered will include loading areas, appropriate access control including signage as well as other measures to improve productivity with reduced disruption.

When addressing network and mobility management, SOLUTIONS will tackle various intelligent transport systems (ITS) technologies and communication technologies applied to transport. This include cooperative systems, transport and traffic management, congestion management, tolling and charging, public transport information systems and other public and individual user technologies. The goal of all these applications being to ensure seamless connectivity, flexible travel, lower environmental impact and support of multimodal mobility patterns and lifestyles. The measures and solutions examined will be those that make the best use of the available resources and help plan and implement additions to the infrastructure network with a focus on the current and future mobility needs. It is important to ensure that mobility is not restricted but rather carried out in an intelligent manner while considering all advantages and disadvantages of different modes and how they can contribute to a sustainable mobility network.

The purpose of the course is to introduce extending sustainable public transportation and develop the feasible measures for public transportation to meet the future needs through interactive. Among the different measures for public transportation widely used in the world, in this course, we are going to explore two of them: BRT and Clean vehicles. Corresponding technology, cost-efficiency issues and relevant examples are discussed.

The SOLUTIONS project addresses a range of measures in the Cluster 2 Transport Infrastructures. The main focus of the cluster and this e-learning course is present summarized information and recommendations about design of urban streets (sharing of road space) and the design for the cycling infrastructure improving the safety of infrastructure.