Capacity building for integrated low-carbon mobility planning in functional urban areas
LOW-CARB aims to overcome a pervasive challenge in Central Europe (CE) to enhance capacities for integrated low-carbon mobility planning for functional urban areas (FUAs). To achieve this, LOW-CARB will tackle the “hot issues” of sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) for FUAs: integrated coordination, institutional cooperation and action plan implementation incl. joint financing and public investments in low-carbon mobility systems in times of austerity. LOW-CARB puts low-carbon public transport (PT) organisation at its centre to reduce GHG emissions, with new combined mobility offers like bike sharing and PT or multimodal information services. PT in FUAs has a high impact potential for reaching the EU’s White Paper goals to cut transport emissions by 60% by 2050 and to halve the use of ‘conventionally fuelled’ cars in urban transport by 2030. LOW-CARB’s strategies, action plans, tools and pilot actions will reduce CO2 emissions by almost 60,000 tons by 2020. These solutions have a high replication potential in CE’s FUAs to improve air quality and quality of life. This will include transferable strategies, tools, trainings, lessons learnt & public events to raise awareness, increase knowledge and foster experience transfer on integrated low-carbon mobility planning in FUAs across CE. Strategies and pilot actions will reflect main challenges and new trends such as open data based mobility planning, integrated mobility platforms or implementation of low-carbon technologies in pilot actions, including a call-a-"clean"-bus service or solar-powered e-bike charging stations to link PT and shared mobility. All project results will be published on a web-based CE SUMP Competence Centre and in public deliverables (e.g. handbooks and factsheets) which enable mobility planning stakeholders to develop low-carbon mobility plans with tailored innovative and combined PT measures to reduce CO2 emissions in FUAs. LOW-CARB represents 11 partners from 7 FUAs in 6 CE countries.