Current urban mobility systems in Europe, characterized by high car mobility shares, have negative environmental and health impacts but struggle to mitigate these for fear of sacrificing accessibility. Ironically, before the car mobility transition (in the 1950s and 1960s in Western countries and the 1990s in Eastern Europe), most cities were accessible by walking, cycling, public transport, and by the few cars there were. Through a longitudinal case study of a medium-sized urban area in Clermont-Ferrand, France (1950–2022), this paper explores the potential to ‘de-transition’, i.e., to reverse the urban transition process towards ‘accessible, low-car cities’ by reshaping infrastructures to constrain car use whilst accommodating walking, cycling, and public transport. We answer the following questions: To what extent can cities reverse the urban car mobility transition? How could such a process be further encouraged? Our analysis adopts a social practices perspective and uses a mixed-methods approach by combining semi-structured interviews, a survey, and a document analysis. On the one hand, our findings highlight the difficulty of an urban modality shift to car alternatives: (1) the limited reach of public transformation networks (in Clermont-Ferrand, the tramline); (2) the fact that many feel unsafe or assume they need excellent health conditions to cycle, which is associated with leisure and sports; and (3) strong convictions concerning the usefulness of vehicle ownership, which is believed to maximise comfort. On the other hand, based on a historic analysis, we offer practical recommendations to de-transition to low-car urban areas: (1) the creation of an extensive regional tramway network; (2) the development of a full cycling network; and (3) the promotion of an extensive car-free city centre.
GIS models are currently available for a broad range of applications in mobility planning. However, it is not known how widespread the current use of GIS models is among European urban mobility planners, nor what their user experiences and needs are. There is therefore a risk that the development of GIS models for urban mobility planning will be mainly driven by technical possibilities and data availability rather than by the needs of the prospective users. To inform model developers and ensure a good match between model options and user needs, we conducted a survey investigating the current application of GIS models in urban mobility planning practice in Europe as well as model data availability and the needs and priorities of European mobility planners regarding GIS models. We received 51 valid responses from the transport departments of 42 cities from 21 European countries. For developers of GIS-based traffic models, the findings indicate that in Europe there is scope for wider adoption and further improvement. The models currently used are considered useful to support urban mobility planning, but more than 60% of the surveyed cities do not yet use them. Increased user-friendliness, in particular for non-experts, appears important to promote wider adoption. Availability of non-traditional types of data, such as real-time data or data at neighborhood level, is still limited in most cities, but this may rapidly change. Finally, there is also considerable interest in traffic models that integrate social and environmental aspects.
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