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moving sustainablyNewsletter 2, February 2007
www.bustrip-project.net
On the way to better urban mobility
Peer review findings
Project is part-financed by the European Union.
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By Virpi Kaukavuori
Drawing by Seppo Leinonen
Better mobility, less traffic
Attractive!Instead of being a huge parking lot, a city can be attractive place to live in and enjoy. The interdependence of transport, health and environment is also clear for those cities who have signed the Aalborg Commitments, guidelines for sustainable development. They are committed to strongly promoting sustainable mobility choices.
“We spend a growing amount of time behind the windscreen, staring at someone else’s exhaust pipe in traffic lights. Is this the direction right, something that we really want, instead of finding smarter solutions for transport?” asks Björn Grönholm, The Head of Environment and Agenda 21 Secretariat of the Union of the Baltic Cities (UBC).
Sixth Aalborg Commitment states the urgent need to work to reduce the necessity for private motorised transport and pro-mote attractive alternatives accessible to all. But who will do this in practice, increasing the share of journeys made by pub-lic transport, on foot and by bicycle and encourage transition to low-emission vehicles? Someone should develop an inte-grated and sustainable urban mobility plan, and on top of all, reduce the impact of transport on the environment and public health. Ambitious!
At least this problem of urban transport has been taken seriously in the BUSTRIP project. It’s in the hands of the cities.
“Transport is an emotional thing”
Bremen, a partner in BUSTRIP, prepares Sustainable Urban Transport Planning (SUTP) with 11 other partners. Lively hanseatic city with 540 000 inhabitants, harbour and car indus-try, has succeeded in attracting passangers to use their own feet, bicycle and public transport, as much as 60 per cent of all the trips made.
“Bremen has a mobility culture where bicycle is a well-accepted mode of transport. There are even shortcuts for cyclists”, Michael Glotz-Richter, Senior Project Manager for ’Sus-tainable Mobility’ in Bremen, notes.
Planning of cycling paths has gone into every necessary detail helping to choose the more sustainable option. The success in Bremen is also based on the integration of Public Transport. 34 operators in the region work together under one umbrella. The result is seamless ticketing, integrated information and coordi-nated schedules.
Public Transport is also integrated with cycling (Bike&Ride), Taxi and Car-Sharing, which gives availability to cars without own-ership, ‘car-on-call’. The access works at 38 stations with an
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ContentsBetter mobility, less traffic
Contents
BUSTRIP at halfway
Peer review findings
Review week in Turku
BUSTRIP closing the sustainability gap
Kouvola Region’s new transport plan
Pilot actions in Sundsvall and in Gdynia
Project Steering Group
Publishing information
Introducing project partners
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electronic car-key. Closely connected with public transport serv-ices, it is often more cost-effective and convinient than a private car. “In Bremen, this service with about 4000 clients, has already replaced 900 private cars”, Glotz-Richter remarks.
Transport is not only a question of planning. ”It is an emotional thing. In TV and movies we don’t usually see traffic problems. The image that we have, has a lot to do with this. People love their cars and we need to change them to love their bikes. The infrastructure and the image have to work hand-in-hand”, he says.
”Sustainability as a first priority”
Car-sharing is one of those innovative ideas that Leena Silfver-berg, Senior Technical Adviser in Finnish Ministry of the Environ-ment, would be pleased to see spreaded all over Europe. ”Inte-grating it to public transport would be a perfect solution for large countries like Finland and Sweden.”
There is also a lot to be thought about logistics. For example, a smart combination of both commercial delivery and munici-pal services with the help of call-centers. ”In Finland, we haven’t realised the possibility to use environmental zones in the city. In practice this means an age limit for vehicles that can enter the city centre, like some Swedish cities have decided”, she says.
Silfverberg thinks there is hope for more sustainable future in transport. ”Ten years ago, when I first heard about the car free day, it seemed impossible to arrange it in Helsinki. Now we have had it for seven years and more and more people would not like to see the cars dominate the city centres anymore. Looking back 20 years, there has been a huge change.”
“Instead of building new and better roads, public transport, walking and cycling should always be the first priorities in plan-ning.” The role of SUTP is also clear. ”It systemises the process and gives the opportunity to gather opinions from wide group of stakeholders. Planning is not only a technical practice, belong-ing to the engineers, but also a matter of our lifestyle and living environment”, Silfverberg says.
”Private cars take more space than public transport in the city centres. It is not efficient, both in terms of using limited amount of space or natural resources, it’s ’idling of engines’. There is no easy way out from transport based private cars if smart plan-ning is forgotten in the beginning.” She thinks taxation should also favor environmentally friendly modes of transport. ”Sustain-able alternatives should always be the most attractive ones also from the citizens’ point of view, and we should remember that in all decision-making.”
“Easy solutions are best solutions”
Björn Grönholm says transport should be planned user friendly. “It is important that it is easy and safe to move. A good transport system is a question of attracting more people to live in the cities. Unfortunately this is not always seen, and gigantic hypermarkets are built outside the cities to be reached only by motorized trans-port. Cities are spreading causing more demands on traffic.”
The transport system has effects on the cities own economy. “We need public-private partnership in planning, bringing new innovative ideas for sustainable and stable economy. Cities need inhabitants and visitors in order to keep their economy in balance. A smart way out would be providing services easily reached by foot”, he says.
Here the role of UBC is clear. “We highlight good practices in cross-sectoral cooperation from Europe and elsewhere.” BUS-TRIP project has already got a lot of positive reflections. “It will be in our interest to continue this work after this project has ended. This is necessary both for general public and transport experts. BUSTRIP is dealing with our everyday lives”, Grönholm says.
“Usually the best solutions are easiest solutions. For me, per-sonally, an ideal situation would be if our children could walk and cycle to school. Traffic should at the same time be safe, sustain-able and easy enough for children to manage.”
“More or wider roads are not a solution.” This is also an issue the UBC has raised on the agenda in Seville 2007, European Con-ference on Sustainable Cities and Towns. Globally, sustainable transport is a serious tool combating climate change.
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WANTED integration, cooperation andimplementation - FOUND visions and nice words
For more information: Anna Granberg, Project [email protected] Saarinen, Project Officer [email protected]
The BUSTRIP (Baltic Urban Sustainable Transport Implementa-tion and Planning) project that runs from July 2005 to the end of 2007 provides practical solutions and tools for medium-sized cities to deliver sustainable urban transport. The BUSTRIP cit-ies are among the first ones in Europe to start preparing and implementing Sustainable Urban Transport Plans (SUTP) in a way that the EU recommends in the Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment.
The Peer review assessments on BUSTRIP partner cities’ trans-port plans and policies have identified the level of sustainable urban transport in 12 Baltic Sea Region cities. Through the Peer reviews, the BUSTRIP cities have learnt from each other and shared problems and solutions in order to design their SUTPs and to accelerate progress towards sustainable urban transport and thus trying to break the link between economic growth and transport growth.
The BUSTRIP SUTP benchmark and process are modified from the final report of EU Expert Working Group 2004 on SUTP. The process in the cities is based on a few main steps. At first phase the partner cities made self-assessment reports on their existing transport plans and policies. In the second phase between April and September 2006 all partner cities were Peer reviewed by transport experts from other partner cities. After the 5-day visits the Peer review teams completed Peer review reports that iden-
BUSTRIP at halfway
tify critical issues to consider and recommendations for actions for the reviewed city to deliver its SUTP.
The Peer review findings and lessons (and good practices) learnt from other cities were discussed in workshop in Göteborg 8-10 November 2006. The analysis of the findings of the Peer reviews shows that the cities despite of different size, society and stage of transport planning share rather common strengths and are facing rather similar challenges on their way to develop sustain-able urban transport plans, policies and behaviour.
BUSTRIP cities have many ambitious sustainable development strategies and plans and visions on sustainable transport, but too often they are just nice words that are not followed by clear objectives, measurable targets, and the necessary actions are not reflected in the budgets. The integration of existing strategies and visions would bring many cities closer to SUTP, as many elements of SUTP exist but they are separate and not coordi-nated. Sustainable urban transport planning and implementa-tion requires also concrete cross-sectoral cooperation and policy coordination between city departments and within the functional urban area of the city, including regional authorities. There is a good start for this in many cities, but the need to tighten up the cooperation and to clearly define the roles and responsibilities on SUTP process is evident.
During 2007, the partner cities continue their SUTP processes by using the Peer review findings as a basis for the work. By this they will develop their transport plans and policies, in some cities integrate and revise existing ones or in some cities write totally new ones in order to have a SUTP by the end of the project. In parallel the cities implement pilot actions that are related to their SUTP. Every partner city implements at least one pilot action that arises from the identified needs for development to reach sus-tainable urban transport.
For the dissemination of the project’s findings, results and out-comes BUSTRIP has new great channel through the Baltic 21 Lighthouse Project Status. BUSTRIP was accepted as Light-house Project in May 2006.
The BUSTRIP SUTP Toolbox The main outcome of the project, the SUTP toolbox will in an easy, simple and maybe even fun way guide interested cit-ies on the path of planning for sustainable urban transports. All project findings, lessons learnt, good practices from part-ner cities, and guiding documents produced in the project serve as basis for the making of the toolbox. The objective is to develop a practical tool that will give comprehensive guidance on SUTP and will enable other BSR and Euro-pean cities to follow the BUSTRIP model towards Sustain-able Urban Transport. The formats of the toolbox will be a book that will be translated into eight BSR languages, and a web site. The basic idea of the toolbox is to instead of pro-viding cities with a lot and a lot of texts guide them through the process in a visually attractive way. The toolbox will be published in the final conference of the project in Turku in November 2007.
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Peer review findings – Key conclusionsIn each of the 12 reviews the peers in the team were trying to find the answers to the question ”What progress is your city mak-ing towards Sustainable Urban Transport?” Officers, politicians and stakeholders all helped to provide parts of the answer and at the end of each review visit the team presented their ‘head-line findings’, with a detailed report sent to each city a month or so later. So what were some of the key conclusions?
• Preparing a self assessment report of a city’s progress towards sustainable urban transport is very challenging but very reward-ing – it can kick-start and support more effective and useful interdepartmental and intersectoral working and helps to iden-tify inconsistencies in existing plans.
• Peer review is a powerful tool for revealing the strengths and weaknesses in a city – both in the process of making plans and in the practical actions that are put in place.
• People must be at the heart of sustainable urban transport – Everybody who is affected by transport needs to be involved in taking decisions about what actions to take – stakeholders, businesses and politicians need to be involved.
• Cities need much better information about existing mobility and freight trends and patterns, they need better understand-ing of the likely consequences of the different initiatives they are thinking about taking – cycle lanes, taxes, pedestrianisation etc – before deciding what actions to take.
• Cities that lead 'by example' find ‘solutions’, not ‘problems’! –and usually have politicians that use the bus, tram and bike and support environmentally friendly vehicle fleets, incentives for businesses to freight-share etc.
• Technology will not solve urban transport problems on its own! People, businesses and companies need to be persuaded to change their travel behaviour and be helped to understand the impact their behaviour is having!
• Walking, cycling and public transport must be cheaper, more attractive and more easy to use. They need to be the sexy option that people choose! Information, communication and market-ing of the sustainable transport options need more resources and effort!
• Cities need to make private personal transport users pay the full environmental cost and use the money to cross subsidise sustainable transport and improve the environment – no more free or subsidised parking and the more polluting vehicles must pay more!
• Travel and transport arises from where people live, work, do their shopping and have fun! – It's impossible to put in place sustainable urban transport without integrating spatial planning with transport planning – and all development has to be sustain-able if there is to be sustainable transport!
• Competition between cities for new business means that some politicians are sacrificing green fields to get development – almost at any cost!
• Many cities are undermining their sustainable transport efforts by agreeing to new business and housing development with-out the necessary public transport, cycle ways and pedestrian facilities.
• All cities need to be more creative in finding finance for sus-tainable transport infrastructure, services and maintenance – Peer review helps to share innovations in technology, finance, plans and solutions - so best practice becomes common prac-tice – saving money and our environment!
For more information:Allen Creedy, Executive Advisor for [email protected]
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Day One - Critical friends arrive in TurkuIt’s Monday morning. Mikko Laaksonen, Bustrip city coor-dinator in Turku, is expecting a team of eight experts to look closely at the transport plans and policies in his city. Peer review, a pioneering method in the field of transport planning, is about to begin.
The hosts’ expectations are high as their future goals are ambi-tious: fewer private cars in the city centre with a more efficient public transport system, significant promotion for walking and cycling. Mikko edited Turku’s self-assessment report, all 108 pages, describing the current situation in Turku.
The peers are in Turku to study the attitudes and the actions the city has already taken to improve the sustainability of urban transport. The first day includes a tour by bus and a cruise by boat, showing some of the city’s challenges related to trans-port and urban planning. Mikko hopes the team will keep their eyes open!
Day Two - Views and interviewsIt’s raining. Everyone who owns a car must be using it. And so today, to the visiting peers, Turku seems a car friendly city. The peer review team is about to meet the reality at their “base room”. During the week altogether 30 interviews with politicians, public servants and interest groups are taking place.
Team members Dace Liepniece and Gintaras Stauskis are meeting the Vice Chair of Executive Board, Pauliina de Anna, a green politician. They are interested in the plans to extend the residential areas towards the archipelago. Will this result in an increase in traffic, as the self assessment report points out? At the same time there is a discussion with the representatives of the student unions going on. Two policemen in their blue uni-forms have also had their say on the transport challenges. Now it’s time to head off back to their daily challenges.
Reviewing a week in Turku The highlight of the day is the meeting with the general public at the Old Town Hall. About 30 people are divided in two dis-cussion groups. Expert team leader, Björn Abelsson is happy with the discussion. ”This is a question of values compared to other values. City’s strategies will also get even more impact when we can get the expression what the citizens themselves have to say”, Abelsson explains.
Day Three - Cycling in the CityThe local paper, Turun Sanomat writes about the public meeting, “More pedestrian streets needed in Turku”. Media has expressed its interest.
There are more interviews to come. Public transport manager, Sirpa Korte, has never seen a method such as peer review used in evaluating city transport and planning processes. “It’s quite an interesting approach. I only wonder how the team can make conclusions over such a short period of time.”
When the day’s interviews are over it is time for the team to jump on the bicycles and experience the cycling network in Turku.
Day Four - Post-it show Back at the base room, peer review culminates in sticking color-ful notes with conclusions on the wall under the 17 headlines of BUSTRIP SUTP benchmark. Pink represents unsustainable practices that should be stopped, yellows are not good, but have a potential to become good practices. Green is a good practice that should be continued. Oranges are innovative new ideas. “Those are the ones that are usually hard to find” Sakari Saarinen, project officer of BUSTRIP admits.
The team has a lot of information to digest. How will they suc-ceed? Team member Dace Liepniece is sticking her notes on the wall. “It is quite easy to pick the most relevant issues, because we have read the self-assessment report carefully”, she says.
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Reviewing a week in Turku By Virpi Kaukavuori
Post-it memo is becoming full, little by little. Are all the opin-ions truly there? How come the team can make the conclu-sions and suggestions on issues the city has tackled over the years? Perhaps it’s easy when they have clear focus: sustain-able development.
Day Five - Findings ready to go!It’s time for final event of the week – the presentation of initial findings. “Turku is a good city with unique values, no conges-tion and good air quality”, Björn Abelsson starts.
Sirpa Korte seems cheerful and finds the event very positive, even though there is some criticism to come. “It is good to get support from an international group of experts to further develop the transport system”, she says.
Among the biggest problems is the lack of regional co-operation and weak planning. According to the critical friends – “there is an urgent need for better cooperation between the municipali-ties and the cycling network should be completed.”
Elderly people are moving in the centre while families with two cars move out to seek space, peace and quietness. What should be done to avoid congestion? Increase road capacity? “No one has succeeded in it so far, Turku may be the first one”, Abels-son says, with a bit of irony.
Hopefully the findings of the peer review will not end up in recy-cling bin. Optimistically, the ideas will be recycled among the decision-makers and politicians in Turku and in other BUSTRIP partner cities. By the end of the project the most valuable find-ings and the lessons learnt in the project can be found from the SUTP toolbox. It will be available for European cities to make use of the BUSTRIP ideas of sustainable transport.
BUSTRIP Peer reviews
• Each partner city made a self-assessment report
• Each partner city named 2-5 urban transport experts to the peer review teams
• For each city a peer review team was named and it carried out a ‘desk review’ of the self-assessment report
• A list of relevant stakeholders to be met in the peer review was agreed between the city and the team
• Peer review team visited the partner city for 5-day review meeting stakeholders and interest groups
• At the end of the visit the team presented its headline ‘findings’ to the municipality stakeholders
• The team completed peer review report couple of months later and sent it to the reviewed city for publishing
• Each city uses its self-assessment and peer review reports to:
- Design the Sustainable Urban Transport Plan of the city
- Verify the pilot actions that will be implemented during the project
- Accelerate progress towards sustainable urban transport
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BUSTRIP closing the sustainability gap
A simple SUTP-check for new projects
By asking a few simple questions, you can get a first, rough pic-ture whether a new plan or development is supporting SUTP-goals or not. Go through the table and cross what changes a project or development leads to in different fields. Projects with no change or decrease in all fields are probably in line with SUTP-goals, many crosses for increase indicate a more problematic development from a sustainability point of view.
Increase No change DecreaseNeed for transport Use of fuel (=CO2 emissions) Noise pollution Air pollution Risk for accidents Difficulties for access for all groups of society (elderly, children, poor)
More than one year has passed since the beginning of the BUS-TRIP project and a lot of work has been done in all partner cities. Most importantly, all BUSTRIP cities have intensified or started their work with sustainable urban transport. The starting situa-tion among the partner cities varied considerably – some already had a long history of working with SUTP-issues, for others the topic was rather new.
All cities have come a long way in better understanding their cur-rent situation and challenges ahead thanks to their work with the self assessment report and peer review. This is an important ele-ment of capacity building that should not be underestimated.
In many cities, the political awareness of the importance of sus-tainable transport for the development of a healthy and attrac-tive city has risen, partly due to the involvement in BUSTRIP. The recently intensified discussion of the need for action on climate change should further support the SUTP-efforts (see frame).
During the remaining year of the project, the cities need to fill the gaps pointed out in the peer review to put forward a SUTP that is adapted to their local conditions. Advanced cities might concentrate on coordinating their existing plans and efforts and strengthening their SUTP-work, while beginner cities need to create working structures, goals and realistic targets. Most important is to create improved coordination between depart-ments, common goals for sustainable (transport) development and a working structure that allows achieving the set targets.
It is essential for the long term success of the cities that the SUTP-work does not stop at the end of the BUSTRIP-project. On the contrary, BUSTRIP should provide the cities with moti-vation, structures, know-how and tools to continue to move towards a truly sustainable transport system.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
Transport – even urban transport – is an important source of cli-mate gas emissions. Even if most climate gases do not have any
For more information:Michael Koucky, UBC TransComCoordinator of the SUTP work [email protected]
direct impact on the city environment, climate change will have a significant impact on cities in many respects.
The British government recently published an independent review on the economic effects of climate change, the s.c. Stern Review. The report strongly supports immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, e.g by reducing the use of petrol and diesel. The report concludes that “Climate change could have very serious impacts on growth and development” and that ” Action on climate change is required across all coun-tries, and it need not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries.”
The four page summary of the Stern report is recommended reading for all decision makers and can easily be found on the internet, both in English and other languages including Polish, German and Russian.
Drawing by Seppo Leinonen
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For more information:Hannu KoverolaHead of planning, Kouvola Region Federation of [email protected]
Cooperation paves way for sustainable transports in Kouvola Region
In 2004, the Kouvola region started the process of creating a regional transport plan by analysing the current state. Popula-tion progress, travel patterns to working places, urban struc-ture changes, financial background and the merging needs and challenges in the region were mapped. The development of the Transport plan took its starting point in the current state analy-sis, the national land use guidelines and the Transport strategy of Kymenlaakso province. In 2006 the Transport Plan was final-ised and the Mayors of the seven municipalities in the region, Anjalankoski, Elimäki, Iitti, Jaala, Kouvola, Kuusankoski and Valkeala signed a letter of intent containing actions for imple-mentation of the plan.
The method of transport system planning used in Kouvola region is strongly about integrating transport and land use planning that affect each other in a complex way. Transport system consists of users, transport services and routes and the parties that main-tain the system. It covers all different forms of modal split, traf-fic, routes and terminals. Regional transport system planning has been carried out on a broad scale in Finland for approxi-mately 15 years. Transport system plans do not, however, con-stitute statutory plans.
The four-step principle developed by Swedish National Road Administration is the basis of the Kouvola Region Transport Plan. As a first step the authorities should influence the need for traveling by land use planning in long term and by influenc-ing the choice of transport mode in short term. If this does not have the desired effect, then as a second step the efficiency of existing infrastructure should be improved. The third step is to actually improve the infrastructure and the fourth step, new investments, should not be used until all means for improve-ment have been used.
For the goals of developing the Kouvola region traffic system four concrete key development assignments (i.e. primary focus areas) have been named:
1. Developing the regional structure so that new developments are located in a way that supports durable modes of transport.
2. Regional external connections are the connections from the Kouvola region to other countries, especially Russia. The goal is to promote healthy competitiveness in the business life of the region, as well as to define target areas for developing public transportation.
3. Internal regional connections are the connections within and between the municipalities of the Kouvola region. The goal is to promote competitiveness of business, to develop public trans-port, walking and cycling and to set up target areas in improv-ing the safety and quality of the urban environment.
4. Developing co-operation means integration of traffic plan-ning strategies into all traffic planning, implementing and land use. General goal is the promotion of holistic thinking in the work of those responsible for the development of traffic sys-tems and land use.
Turning the goals into action requires making choices between different values since not all the desired changes can be fully achieved at the same time. Some of the goals may also be con-flicting with each other. Developing external connections will give opportunities to increase even more freight transport going through the region. On the other hand development of railroads can be seen more sustainable than developing the road network. So far the most important results of the new Kouvola Region Transport Plan have been the on-going cooperation between the working groups and the comprehensive view of the trans-port system that is a result of the process.
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Pilot Action updates
Poor air quality in the city centre is a challenge in Sundsvall. Dur-ing wintertime the conditions are poor. On cold days car emis-sions remain near the ground and due to the hilly landscape the pollution stays in the centre. The city has been committed to fight the problem: measures taken have been an expansion of the central heating system and replacing coal and oil heating in single family houses with renewable sources. The remaining challenge is traffic’s harmful and climate changing emissions.
Sundsvall has been testing alternative fuels in the public trans-port fleet because of the harmful effect of fossil fuel emissions on human’s health and the acidification of the soil and water. Also the increasing worry about the climate change and the fact that oil is a non-renewable source of energy has strength-ened the effort.
In the beginning of the process, buses were adjusted for lique-fied petroleum gas. Smaller buses were also tested by petrol engines with catalysts. This was done before the catalysts for diesel buses came on market. For many years, a large share of the buses were running on ethanol. Ethanol buses were rather expensive; the municipality had to pay 300.000 Euro extra per year because of the lower effectiveness of ethanol compared to diesel.
In 2003, Sundsvall started to test synthetic diesel in two buses. The pilot project went well and in 2006 six buses run on syn-thetic diesel and the amount is expected to rise. The synthetic diesel is 20% more expensive than ordinary diesel but the bene-fits it has compensates for the price. It can be used in the exist-ing engines without modifications. It has the same capacity and works well when cold starting and is also possible to mix with ordinary diesel. Synthetic diesel is not as toxic as ordinary die-sel and has low emissions of ashes and particles.
The synthetic diesel used today is produced by liquefied petro-leum gas, but the aim is to replace it with synthetic diesel made of biomass mainly from wood residues. In that way the diesel would not contribute to the global warming. To run the pub-lic transport fleet totally on synthetic diesel is one of the pilot actions that Sundsvall is working on within the BUSTRIP project and is a part of the city’s strategy to move towards sustaina-ble transports.
For more information:Christer TarbergBUSTRIP Coordinator, City of [email protected]
Synthetic diesel buses in Sundsvall
City of Gdynia is implementing one of the first Intelligent Trans-port Systems (ITS) in Poland. ITS will be installed on a 4 km stretch, 10 intersections, of the busiest part of Morska street - one of Gdynia’s main transport routes and one of the main com-munication arteries in the whole Tri-City region.
Morska has for a very long time had congestion problems. One reason for this is the freight transport to and from the port. It also runs through a densely populated area and connects the city centre to the suburbs thus the congestion is also due to private cars. To reduce the second factor, Gdynia has acknowledged that it must apply public transport quality improvement meas-ures. Therefore traffic lights priority will be given to public trans-port on the intersections.
In practice, 50 buses and trolley buses will be equipped with special computer devices which will enable priority manage-ment. The present controllers in the traffic lights will be changed, loop detectors will be put in street lanes and pedestrian detec-tors on crossroads, new traffic lights will be built on one inter-section and a Traffic Management Centre will be opened with a Central Management System.
The main objective of the pilot action is to increase the quality of public transport on Morska Street - influence time and com-fort of travel, decrease congestion, and make more effective use of the street.
In order to measure the results of the pilot action, one travel and traffic analysis has already been conducted and another one will be done after the implementation of ITS. Thus the city will obtain data to see if a significant enough change occurs in the quality of public transport and in general traffic between “before” and “after” ITS introduction.
The pilot action is part of a grand concept to implement ITS technology in the whole Tri-City and will provide Gdynia with val-uable practical knowledge.
For more information:Alicja PawłowskaBUSTRIP coordinator, City of [email protected]
Intelligent transport in Gdynia
All BUSTRIP cities implement small scale pilot actions that apply the improved planning structures to move towards achieving targets of their SUTPs. Each city has produced detailed pilot action planning report during the autumn 2006. Several cities changed their original pilot action plans in order to implement recommendations of the peer reviews. Three pilot action theme groups have been established to encourage transnational cooper-
ation and joint solutions to common challenges. The cities in “Pub-lic Transport” group implement measures with the aim to increase the attractiveness of public transport. The cities in the “Awareness Rais-ing” group work on behavioural change and the “Clean Transport” cit-ies focus on improving air quality.
For more information on BUSTRIP pilot actions: Sönke Behrends, Chalmers University of [email protected]
BUSTRIP Newsletter 2
PublisherUBC Environment and Agenda 21 SecretariatThe Old Observatory, Vartiovuori, FIN-20700 Turku, FinlandTel: +358 2 262 3201, Fax: +358 2 262 3425
Project contact personsAnna Granberg, Project CoordinatorMob. +358 50 4017 816, [email protected] Saarinen, Project OfficerMob. +358 44 9075 994, [email protected]
Editorial teamSakari Saarinen, Chief-editor (UBC), Anna Granberg (UBC), Sari Bowie (UBC, layout), Virpi Kaukavuori (UBC, editor)
IllustrationsDrawings - Seppo LeinonenFront page Sundsvall (big photo), small photos EnvCom, page 4 Vilnius, pages 6-7 EnvCom, page 9, Kouvola Region. Newsletter template by ID BBNISBN 978-952-99739-4-1 (nid.), 979-952-99739-5-8 (PDF) Published in February 2007Printed by PainoPrisma Oy.
BUSTRIP is part-financed by European Union (European Regional Development Fund) within the BSR INTERREG III B Neighbourhood Programme, the Finnish Ministry of Environment and partner cities.This Newsletter reflects the authors’ views. The European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained in this publication.
The BUSTRIP is part of the UBC Agenda 21 Programme 2004-2009 - Roadmap for Sustainable Baltic Cities.
From left, Michael Koucky and Lisa Sundell from UBC TransCom, Allen Creedy and Anna Granberg from UBC EnvCom, Sönke Behrends from Chalmers University of Technology, Sofie Vennersten from UBC TransCom and Sakari Saarinen from UBC EnvCom during the Peer Review Findings Workshop in Göteborg in November 2006. Top right, Maria Lindholm and Magnus Blinge from Chalmers University of Technology and Björn Grönholm from UBC EnvCom.
Project Steering Group
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Part-financed by the European Union
Bremen
UBC EnvCom (LP)Anna [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Kouvola RegionHannu [email protected]
UBC TransComSofie [email protected] [email protected]
Chalmers University of TechnologyMagnus [email protected] [email protected]önke [email protected]
GöteborgGunilla [email protected]
BremenMichael [email protected]
GdyniaAlicja Pawł[email protected]
LiepajaDace [email protected]
TartuMarek [email protected]
PärnuKarri [email protected]
KaunasJames [email protected]
VilniusDanguole [email protected] [email protected]
SundsvallChrister Tarberg [email protected]
ÖrebroPer [email protected]
Project partners
www.bustrip-project.net
Kouvola
