Overview
Sustainable mobility is such if it supports the simultaneous achievement of long-term economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection. This translates into a number of policy objectives that a sustainable transport system, in the EU and elsewhere, has to simultaneously contribute to.
A list of the main objectives in accessibility, environmental and economic points of views is:
- Ensure mobility equity and accessibility: high-quality at affordable prices for all users;
- Ensure a high level of safety and reliability in mobility of people and goods;
- Promote the efficient combination of different transport modes (co-modality);
- Contribute to the reduction of resource utilisation, thus including energy (reducing the consumption of fossil fuels), land and materials;
- Contribute to increasing the use of renewable energy sources and local feedstock;
- Limit emissions and waste within planet’s absorption capacity for avoiding local air pollution and ecosystem degradation, and limit transport noise;
- Contribute to the reduction of emissions of CO2 and other GHGs;
- Promote innovation and the development of transport technologies that are competitive on global markets;
- Increase the rate of economic return for all stakeholders, including those employed in the mobility/transport sector as well as the end-users of transport services, be they individuals or businesses;
- Contribute to regional development.
The project consisted of analysis, comparison and dissemination of the most important results obtained in sustainable mobility projects by means of two one day thematic conferences and a final conference organisation.
The criteria for the project selection process were:
- their research relevance for the topic (socio-economic barriers to sustainable mobility);
- respect of the research audience for the project team;
- published outputs of the relevant EU funded projects.
One limitation that at the same time served as a selection criterion was the possibility to get information about the project in the public domain (project web pages, published articles in scientific journals, etc.). From about 250 projects, 46 projects were selected, which were referred to in the brochure on 'European research on socio-economic barriers to sustainable mobility'. Nine projects were presented at the Prague conference.
Funding
Results
The conference on socioeconomic barriers to sustainable transport took place on 18 June 2007 in the Charles University headquarters, Ovocny trh 3, Prague. The conference was organised by the Charles University Environment Centre in Prague.
The aim of the conference was to introduce European projects on the selected socioeconomic barriers to sustainable transport, their main findings and recommendations. Simultaneously, problems observed during the implementation of these projects and the possibility of their overcoming was discussed.
The economic aspects of sustainable mobility included competitiveness and economic development aspects, comprising the following topics:
- direct and external costs of transport;
- transport investment appraisal;
- regulation of transport services;
- transport infrastructure pricing;
- drivers of demand for transport;
- links between transport;
- land-use planning and regional development;
- development of scenarios and evaluation of policies.
The social aspects dealt mainly with equity and accessibility issues, meaning that the benefits of transport strategies should be distributed reasonably equally (social inclusion) and various facilities (employment, shopping, leisure, etc.) are easy to reach.
The conference was dominated by two prominent themes - assessment of transport trends and impacts, and breaking dependence on oil. Particularly, results of research and demonstration projects from the Fifth and Sixth Research Technological Development and Demonstration Framework Programme (RTD FP) were presented.
The 'research on vehicles for sustainable mobility' section of the London conference dealt with sustainable vehicles. Starting off with the database compiled by the MOBIDAYS consortium, the IST further worked to find projects connected with the vehicle innovation and individualised the 170 projects reported in the MOBIDAYS brochure on vehicle projects classified in the following way:
- conventional internal combustion engines (diesel and gasoline; alternative fuels);
- new combustion modes;
- hybrid ? electric vehicles;
- fuel cell vehicles (fuel cell stacks and related technologies, integration and applications to road vehicles);
- new materials and manufacturing processes;
- vehicle noise;
- vehicle safety;
- new vehicle design concepts;
- urban mobility.
The conference
Policy implications
The MOBIDAYS consortium proposed some solutions the EC could implement. In particular, the CORDIS database could be improved and systematically linked to the other relevant tools developed by the EC. In addition, a new database could be built which for all relevant projects collecting data, models, tools developed, deliverable reports and, the 'Plan for using and disseminating the knowledge'. In order to address the problem of keeping track of the commercial exploitation of technologies originally developed as part of EC-funded projects, the introduction of a labelling scheme could be considered.