Returning the city of Madrid to the people
City: Madrid
Audience: Large City
Topic: Integrated Planning
Step in the SUMP cycle: Step 5: Develop vision and strategy with stakeholders
More Information:
Eltis.org
Activity description
The city of Madrid has developed its Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) which sets the overall objectives for the city to 2020. These objectives are about improving the environmental quality, economic competitiveness, road safety and the comprehensive character of the city’s mobility model. The SUMP defines the city’s priorities, anticipates future scenarios, establishes concrete actions and indicates the necessary considerations for their enforcement. The Plan’s ambition is to give the city back to the people, who lost it to vehicles. It will enable public transport to be more flexible and complete, and it will guarantee the enjoyment of more attractive and healthier streets that will promote active mobility.
Lessons learned
This Plan presents important challenges such as designing a more local, humanised, social urban space for people to enjoy, in a vast metropolis that endures millions of daily journeys and that needs to stay accessible and economically efficient. The specific challenges will be improving the environmental quality of the city and calming traffic while also guaranteeing a certain amount of private vehicle traffic by means of road regulation and organisation. Increasing the operating speed of public transport also represents a challenge, especially outside the M-30 (the orbital motorway circulating central districts of Madrid) and so does improving the efficiency of the distribution of urban goods. But at the same time, city officials say that this Plan offers the opportunity to give space back to the citizens by maximizing the leisurely character of streets and squares, and the opportunity to increase the social and natural capital for citizens of Madrid, who wish to continue evolving and living in a healthy, efficient and comfortable city.