Overview
European populations have become more aware of the importance of sustainability and how it can enhance the quality of life. Transport plays a large role in making the environments of urban areas more sustainable, and hence it can also make them more attractive for people wanting to live there. The ADVANCE Project aims at contributing towards this by developing an auditing and certification scheme for cities taking part in the project, which will allows the project to evaluate and improve local authorities sustainable urban mobility policies and actions.
The ADVANCE Project has five main objectives:
- To improve the quality of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs);
- To establish a critical mass of participants in the project, with the goal of it producing a snowball effect of participants wanting to take part in the project;
- To support local actions;
- To promote SUMPs throughout Europe, and
- To contribute to energy savings on a European Level.
The ADVANCE Project approaches its goals through targeting stakeholders and cities that so far do not have SUMPs, to get them to develop action plans through the ADVANCE audit and certification scheme, as well as disseminate and exchange their knowledge with other cities.
The ADVANCE audit implementation process consists of four different steps:
- The development of a prototype of the audit scheme;
- The testing and further improvement of the audit scheme;
- The application of the ADVANCE audit scheme, and;
- The training of external auditors.
Results
The main results of the project are:
- the development of the ADVANCE Audit Scheme including guidelines, description of the certification procedure and an assessment tool (excel and online questionnaire) – available in EN, DE, ES, EL, FR, NL, PL, RO, SI, SK and SWE
- the implementation of the ADVANCE Audit in 9 European cities and 6 municipalities in the Brussels region.
- the identification of a further 43 municipalities interested in starting the ADVANCE Audit in the near future.
- the training of 122 ADVANCE Auditors that are certified to conduct ADANCE Audits in Auditors in AT, BE, HR, CZ, DK, FR, DE, EL, PL, RO, SK, SL, SP and SE.