News

The Interreg Central Europe project LOW-CARB is candidate under the “Green Europe” category, and will be assessed by a Jury led by Michel Barnier, who holds the Chair of Honor of the Regiostars Awards Jury this year. A panel of high-level academics in the respective fields will select the finalists. We are looking forward to that!

As a novelty, in 2021 the finalists are invited to training sessions on communication as part of the European Week of Regions and Cities in October. The winners in the five categories, and the winner of the public choice, will receive their well-deserved prize at the festive REGIOSTARS ceremony, to take place in Dubrovnik, Croatia in December 2021.

And why should LOW-CARB win? LOW-CARB showed how public transport provides a pathway towards an integrated, zero-emission mobility system in functional urban areas. The projects made six urban areas and their surrounding communities “greener” and prepared them for the transition to a carbon-neutral future in Central Europe’s communities. Therefore, ten project partners teamed up to facilitate and shape this transition by tackling burning issues of SUMP, multimodal regional PT systems and their governance models.

Check out our website with all our outputs and results… We recommend to start with our lessons learnt brochure or the LOW-CARB guidelines for integrated low-carbon mobility planning in the functional urban area!

Regiostars awards are the yearly competition organised by DG REGIO since 2008: it has become the Europe’s label of excellence for EU-funded projects, which demonstrate innovative and inclusive approaches to regional development. Each year hundreds of projects compete in five categories: Smart Europe, Green Europe, Fair Europe, Urban Europe, and the topic of the year. The public can participate by voting for their favourite project among all finalists for the public choice award. By bringing about solutions to common challenges and tapping into the biggest opportunities, the Regiostars have inspired regions to deliver evermore-impactful EU regional policy.

Find more information here.

The present article focusses on the application of an agent-based mobility simulation model for the city of Vienna which utilizes activity chain descriptions of the simulated agent’s daily objectives. This is done in the context of the goals of project LEVITATE.

It entails a brief description of the model method, the specific  features of the model, the expectable and intended output of the model, its general assumptions as well as details on two specific areas of interest within the project objectives, namely automated urban transport and road use pricing.

Read the full article here.

France has become the first European country that adapted its road and traffic regulations to allow the operation of fully-automated vehicles on public rods with the decree that has been published by the French government on 1 July 2021. The decree amends road regulations to authorise testing of automated driving vehicles on public French roads. 

Following the national strategy for the development of autonomous vehicles, published in May 2018, France has published the decree adapting the provisions of the Highway Code and the Transport Code to allow from September 2022, on predefined routes or zones, vehicles equipped with delegated driving systems and automated road transport systems. Until now the highway code only considered the case of the driving of a vehicle by a person. From now on, it also provides for the possibility of an automated driving system controlling the movement of the vehicle.

The decree introduces various advancements to the French transport legislation such as an updated criminal liability system. The decree allows the driver to release its liability as soon as the automated driving system operates in accordance with its conditions of use. Another newly defined feature by the decree is the terms of interaction between the driver and the automated driving system, as well as the emergency manoeuvers that the system may need to perform automatically. A further change that has been introduced by the decree is the identification of the level of attention expected from the driver on its driving environment when a driving system is activated.

The newly published decree is seen as a major development for automated driving. Similar legislative actions have been taken in Europe in the past, the UK government announcing that by the end of 2021, “hands-free” automated vehicles offering automated lane-keeping systems (ALKS) will be legal to operate on UK roads and Germany adopting a legislation that will allow companies to deploy robotaxis and driverless delivery services on public roads by 2022 are two examples of these advancements. Nevertheless, the decree published by the French government is seen as a first in Europe. France becomes the first European country to put in place a complete regulatory framework for the circulation of autonomous vehicles.

Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, Minister Delegate in charge of Transport mentioned the importance of the decree in his latest speech. “With this decree, we are taking another step towards the mobility of the future. France is establishing itself as one of the first countries to adapt its law to autonomous vehicles. As of today, we are giving our manufacturers and transport operators the visibility necessary to develop them – and tomorrow, make them work”

Read the full press release in French here.

A new-generation software architecture, delivered by the European project CLASS, is revolutionising the interaction of smart cities with their vehicles and citizens in real time. To do so, the CLASS software architecture facilitates the way programmers develop, deploy and execute complex big data-analytics over a heterogeneous edge and cloud ecosystem aiming at collecting, storing, analysing and processing vast amounts of data, in order to transform it into valuable knowledge for the public sector, private companies and citizens.

Current trends towards the use of big data technologies in the context of smart cities suggest the need of novel software ecosystems upon which advanced mobility functionalities can be developed. “Can you imagine a city where data is shared between the city and cars to allow for smart traffic management and advanced driver assistance systems? This is the contribution of CLASS project that facilitates development of complex big-data analytics capable of enhancing the interaction between vehicles and citizens in urban areas in real-time”, says Eduardo Quiñones, CLASS coordinator and senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

“In the real-life urban laboratory of the Modena Automotive Smart Area (MASA), CLASS has tested out the most innovative smart-city technologies, paving the way towards a truly responsive urban area which improves the quality of life for all citizens”, said Luca Chiantore, Manager of the department of smart city, demographic services and participation of the Modena City Council. The advanced analytics on the data collected from a network of interconnected cameras located in the MASA and from two fully sensorised Maserati cars have demonstrated the CLASS innovative potential in traffic management and advanced driver-assistance systems. As Mara Tonietti, Innovation Specialist at Maserati, pointed out, “CLASS has combined the proud Italian tradition of high-end cars with the needs of modern smart cities, enhancing the capabilities of connected vehicles”.

Read the full article here.

Our partners from Kraków and Skawina kicked off a metropolitan SUMP for the metropolitan region of Kraków – using the SUMP Self-Assessment Tool, co-created by LOW-CARB. This is one of the many LOW-CARB results we are proud of. Check out the others in the LOW-CARB Lessons-Learnt Brochure, which is out now. You will find our main results and take-aways in this document.

Planning for integrated and low-carbon mobility for public transport (PT) was at the core of the LOW-CARB project. The main objective was to increase public transport accessibility in the functional urban area (FUA) of cities in central Europe, thereby creating good planning practices, tools, and strategies with high take-up potential.

This could only be achieved when planners in municipalities, public transport authorities and companies join forces and cooperate beyond administrative, departmental, and organizational boundaries. With these objectives in mind, six LOW-CARB partner teams (in FUAs of Leipzig, Brno, Szeged, Koprivnica, Kraków, Skawina and Parma) developed action plans, pilots and tools for innovative low-carbon mobility.

Find more information about LOW-CARB and our knowledge resources here.

A contribution by Nermin Palić, Sarajevo.

The day has finally arrived. On December 30, 2020, the Sarajevo City Council adopted the Plan for Sustainable Urban Mobility of the Sarajevo Canton and the City of Sarajevo – SUMP. Key actors from government institutions, the non-governmental sector, the professional public, the academic community, as well as interested citizens were invited to the online presentation. With this strategic document, Sarajevo has shown its committment to work towards sustainable development, in line with the 2030 Agenda (Global Development Agenda), adopted at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in New York on September 25, 2015, and sustainable development goals.

The Sarajevo SUMP is the result of the regional project “Sustainable Urban Mobility in the Countries of Southeast Europe II” within the framework of German development cooperation. The project is part of the Open Regional Fund for Southeast Europe – Energy Efficiency (ORF-EE) implemented by GIZ on behalf of the German government.

The main pillars on which SUMP Sarajevo is based are: cycling and walking as an active form of mobility, urban public transport, individual personal transport, city logistics and sustainable spatial planning and urban mobility.

Sarajevo already has a respectable base for developing a sustainable urban environment for mobility. The density of the urban public transport network covers the entire territory of the urban part of Sarajevo. There are various modes of transportation. The cycle path is under construction. One part, of planned 14 km, has already been built and released for usage. In the past 5 years, a bike-sharing service has been introduced in Sarajevo, just like, last year, the e-scooter sharing service (although not quite legally regulated from the safety aspect).

However, these options are not used at their full capacity. One of the key problems is in the very consciousness of the citizens. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country with a dominant use of passenger cars, with an average age of 16 years (mostly with a Euro 3 engine). This is one of the reasons why Sarajevo Canton has a serious problem with excessive air pollution. In addition to this, there is an obsolete vehicle fleet in public transport in Sarajevo. Transportation services are not integrated, nor is the method of ticket payment. It can also be pointed out that there is no digitized timetable and tracking of vehicles at stops. Furthermore, the culture of using bicycles for transportation purposes has not even existed in the past 6-7 years. In addition, there is an insufficiently developed awareness and vision of cyclists as equal participants in traffic, both by motor vehicle drivers and pedestrians.

Fortunately, all these shortcomings are covered by the adopted SUMP, which will be addressed in the next 5 years. Despite this plan, it is very important and necessary to increase promotional and educational activities using all existing tools to raise citizens’ awareness of the activities pointed out by the SUMP in order to achieve a better quality of life for citizens in terms of safety, health, and environmental protection.

There is a lot of work to be done, but given the vision that is being pursued, the implementation of SUMP creates joy in the eyes of citizens.

The complete SUMP for Sarajevo can be found following this link.

Author: Nermin Palić, Ph.D. (c) Academic Head of Transport/Traffic Engineering Department at University College “CEPS-Center for Business Studies” and founder of UMobSa.com

References:

Plan održive urbane mobilnosti Kantona Sarajevo i Grada Sarajevo, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Sarajevo, 2020.

Mehanović, M., Palić, N.:   A model of managing the urban mobility planning process, EMC Review, Apeiron, god VIII, br. II, str. 300, Banja Luka 2018. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.7251/EMC1802300M)

Palić, N., Cinac, Dž.: Analysis of traffic system in Sarajevo in order to focus its further development towards European standards, EDUK@TOR, Sveučilište/Univerzitet Vitez, Vitez, 2015.