Learning Centre

Tackling transport challenges is crucial for sustainable urban development. Transforming urban transport systems towards being inclusive, safe, clean and low-carbon requires multiple and comprehensive action of a wide range of stakeholders. This has been recognized by the Paris Agreement and the NDC’s in which many countries dedicatedly focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions of urban transport. The Agenda 2030 includes the target to improve the access to urban transport in the urban SDG 11 whereas other targets on air pollution, road safety, energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction require particular attention to urban transport. Further, theNew Urban Agenda will outline the responsibilities and necessary steps to empower cities and local governments to realize their ambitions on improving urban mobility and reducing the negative impact of transport in urban areas. In the webinar, Cornie Huizenga, Secretary General of the Sustainable Low Carbon Transport Partnership (SLoCaT) and Oliver Lah (Wuppertal Institute, Member of the Habitat III Policy Unit 9 on Urban Services and Technology) provide an overview on urban mobility in the global climate agreement, the Agenda 2030 as well as up-to-date insights into the current work of the Habitat III Policy Units whose work is decisive for shaping the New Urban Agenda.

This webinar presents the combined experience from many pro-cycling campaigns of the European Cyclists' Federation as indicated in the webinar's subtitle: "Communicating campaign messages to the general public".

The delivery of goods makes up a significant share of traffic in European cities and is a major contributor to deteriorating air quality, rising carbon emissions and congestion. CIVITAS cities encourage the use of cleaner freight vehicles and are developing solutions to better coordinate freight logistics. More efficient freight deliveries can reduce congestion, lower emissions and free up space for sustainable modes.

By making better use of data, urban traffic and transport can be improved and made more efficient and sustainable, and cities can become more liveable and attractive. There is evidence from different countries showing that the provision of open data delivers benefits: to travellers and users by improving their journey experience and saving them time, and to transport organizations and authorities by enabling them to operate more efficiently while demonstrating openness and transparency to those who - directly or indirectly - fund them. To encourage cities and (public transport) companies to open their data more than they do now and to show how this works in practice, in this webinar some stories were shared. In the webinar some nice and diverse examples were shown of how data can be translated into useful information that can then be used to enable certain services and measures. Claudio Mantero (from Horarios do Funchal) showed the example of sharing public transport data and displaying departure times in Funchal (Madeira) and Tommaso Bonino (from Bologna, SRW - Reti e Mobilità) showed the example of what can be done with cycling data (plan locations of 1,000 bicycle shelters!) and public transport data. Aviad Heilbrun (from the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo) and Torbjørn Barslett (from Ruter As in Oslo) presented how they collect and present open data (technical platform) and what is done with it. In Tel Aviv-Yafo two hackathons were organized (in 2014 and 2016) and this helped in building a community around open data and generating a lot of ideas on what to do with the data.

This webinar presents the experience of one city (London Borough of Houslow) with the costs of a particular behaviour change campaign in favour of walking and cycling as part of the SWITCH project.

Number plate restrictions are an easy, low-cost, short-term measure that has been adopted in various cities around the world with the aim to reduce congestion and air pollution. However, their medium and long-term impacts have been widely debated. The webinar focused on the rationale of plate restrictions, the types of restrictions that have been adopted, and the difficulty to know the actual effects of these measures. Carlosfelipe Pardo (Despacio) provided insights on the experience of Bogotá and other cities worldwide.