Approach

The SPROUT approach is based on the concept of cities cooperating with the aim of building an appropriate response towards the urban mobility transition. Such cooperation will translate in a 3-layer structure, composed by 6 pilot cities, 9 validation cities, and 25 associated cities.

Six pilot cities will look at likely impacts and operational feasibility of new mobility solutions, identify areas where policy interventions will be needed, and then test and validate the pilot solutions. The pilots vary in their focus: passenger, freight or integrated transport; from the very local to the peri-urban; and emphasizes  different special user groups. Policy priorities vary too: mobility itself, land-use, gender/age issues, financing have greater or lesser weight in the different cities.

SPROUT will also engage with nine validation cities and urban areas, each of which will be contributing to the revision of one or more of the pilot solutions, thus ensuring that findings are generally applicable. A third layer of cities will be also engaged, by training on project’s tools and contributing to the project’s dissemination activities.

Urban transition inventory and drivers

The starting point of the process of defining the urban mobility transition will consist in assessing the status of urban mobility in SPROUT cities.

This will be done by:

  • constructing an inventory of the elements reflecting urban mobility transition
  • identifying a set of KPIs to track the current status of urban mobility
  • defining the drivers of urban mobility transition in SPROUT cities
  • defining the stakeholders affected by the transition

Urban mobility scenarios

The collection of dominant drivers of mobility transition and the analysis of the current state of mobility will be the basis of the creation of do-nothing scenarios for the SPROUT pilot cities. Two scenarios will be built for the two different time-horizons (2025 and 2030), which will assume that no policy interventions have been adopted.

This methodology has two objectives:

  • The definition of the expected sustainability and policy impacts of the scenarios
  • The creation of a basis for the setup of the pilots in the 1st layer cities, as well as the assessment of alternative policy responses.