Policy Dossier

Urban Mobility

European cities need to address three main challenges today in terms of urban mobility:

Protecting human beings from the risks inherent from mobility, i.e. avoiding accidents during transport and violence on the vehicles and in the stations;
Replying to the population’s increased mobility demands and their consequences, that is, for instance, reducing congestion, providing a reliable and rapid public transport, optimising the capacity of existing transport infrastructures by improving intermodality and gaining efficiency in each domain by suitable use of ITS technologies ;
Protecting the environment, i.e. reducing CO2 emissions, air pollution and noise in urban areas.

UNIFE believes that in order to respond to these challenges, it is necessary to promote a modal shift to public transport. Rail-bound urban transport (light rail, metros and commuter trains), as it is the most environmentally-friendly, safest and most reliable and rapid transport mode, provides the best solution to urban mobility challenges.

Since early 2007, the EU started a reflection process to become active in urban mobility issues. In September 2007, the Commission published a Green Paper on Urban Mobility, and finally, in September 2009, an Action Plan on Urban Mobility.

In order to make transport more sustainable in the European cities and for the EU to meet its CO2 emission reduction targets of 20% by 2020, UNIFE considers that, besides the measures proposed in the Commission’s action plan, it is necessary to put in place policies that promote modal shift to public transport and develop urban rail-bound transport networks. In this regard, the association promotes in particular the following measures:

A portion of the EU budget should be allocated to clean public transport when revising the EU financial perspectives and the proportion for clean public transport investments among structural and cohesion funds should be increased;
A European legal framework for urban charging should be created to allow revenues to be used for financing clean public transport infrastructure;
The European Union should develop a legal framework for green infrastructure procurement, where the environmental performance of the infrastructure and operations should be assessed, before granting public funding.

For more information, please contact:

Jeremie Pelerin

Corporate & Public Affairs Manager

jeremie.pelerin@unife.com

+32 2 642 23 25

UNIFE Links

To access UNIFE’s news release "Action Plan on Urban mobility, A welcome but insufficient tool" (01.10.2009) please click here

To access UNIFE’s position paper "Green paper on urban mobility" (27.03.2008) please click here

External Links

To access the EC Action Plan for Urban Mobility, please click here

To access the EC Green Paper - Towards a new culture for urban mobility, please click here

To access the EC webpage dedicated to urban mobility, please click here