Sustainable mobility planning in Poland

Abstract

For some time, sustainable urban mobility planning has been in the centre of attention of various cities and municipalities in Poland. Its substance involves integrating the urban transport and spatial policy. While the transport policy is well established in the functioning of Polish cities, its impact on their spatial sphere regarding balancing the mobility is extremely insufficient. The situation is even more difficult in metropolitan areas combining various territorial, functional and spatial subsystems. The article presents the idea and scope of sustainable urban mobility planning, the process of making the mobility in the Polish cities more sustainable, review of strategic documents on the national level referring to the said issue and the process of space metropolization as a challenge for developing mobility in a sustainable manner.

The quality of life in Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning. The case study of the Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski

“…The need for strategic planning of mobility issues in urban areas results directly from its importance for the quality of life. Moreover, sustainable urban mobility plans integrate the above mentioned aspects [Wołek 2018] but there is a need to develop a proper research framework to evaluate quality of life in cities of different size and morphology. Urban mobility determines access to other 'urban products', therefore its importance goes far beyond transport-related issues.…”

Investigating urban form, and walkability measures in the new developments. The case study of Garnizon in Gdansk

“…Consequently, the car is still a commonly accepted transport mode in Poland. This situation could be improved through integrated planning and mobility strategies to reduce car use as seen in Western European countries (Bartosiewicz and Pielesiak, 2019;Saeidizand et al, 2021;Wołek, 2018). However, these processes need to be planned as multi-level (national, regional and local) and long-term.…”

“…M. Wołek, suggests that there are several ways in which the automotive industry in Poland is constantly supported. These are, among others: low parking fees, no fees for entering city centres by car, accessibility of parking spaces (along streets and on sidewalks), lack of emission-free zones, and finally investing EU funds most of all in road infrastructure, which is an additional incentive to use private cars (Wołek, 2018). As a consequence of the socio-political background of Poland, urban planners and decision-makers can be less willing to reduce the number of parking places or increase fees for entering the city than in Western countries.…”

Urban public transport development in Poland in 2004-2020 Co-financed by EU: geography and disparities

“…However, the most part of EU funding was spending on the major metropolitan areas of Poland (Churski, 2017). Among the probable reasons of this trend the higher population density and hence bigger opportunity for users to benefit from investment (Churski et al, 2016), disparity in human capital between large and medium cities on the one hand and smaller population centres (Wołek, 2018) and the bigger investment attractiveness of voivodeship capitals compared to cities and towns without this status (Przybyła et al, 2020) are identified. Bachtler et al (2019) expressed that in the next version of EU Cohesion Policy for every certain medium-and underdeveloped region its local opportunities and challenges had to be better recognised by differentiating their support and allocating of financial resources.…”