2nd workshop on Urban Mobility held in Copenhagen.

16.05.2014 |

12 external stakeholders gathered in Europe's "Green Capital" to discuss the implementation of the Transport White Paper.

The TRANSFORuM stakeholder group preparing for the bicycle tour

The second TRANSFORuM workshop on Clean Urban Mobility took place in Copenhagen, Denmark. On May 14 and 15. The City of Copenhagen hosted the workshop in its historic city hall and kicked-off the event with a fascinating overview of its innovative set of mobility packages, which contributed to its current fame as “Green Capital of Europe.”

Twelve external stakeholders attended the workshop – in addition to seven TRANSFORuM consortium members. The former included representatives from various NGOs, QUANGOs, city administrations, consultancies and think tanks, industry associations like UITP, city networks, the European Commission. Together they covered 10 different countries from all parts of Europe.

The purpose of the event was to discuss the current draft version of the TRANSFORuM roadmap on urban mobility (enclosed in the briefing paper) but also at the same time to provide constructive criticism to it, to identify gaps, suggest alternative structuring approaches etc. The discussion was moving along a set of key guiding questions, which are also provided in the briefing paper.

Overall, the debate proved extremely valuable with some refreshing perspectives, new ideas about ways to structure the roadmaps, a heightened awareness of various technical, socio-cultural, political and other challenges but also new inspirational insights into additional good practice cases. The essence of these discussions will be available soon in the form of workshop minutes on the related section on the TRANSFORuM website.

On top of all this, the event also helped to create a small community of experts and practitioners who all embraced the European Commission’s White Paper goal on urban transport. The dinner on Wednesday evening at a local restaurant certainly contributed to this effect as did the tour on Thursday afternoon on the "world's smartest bike" (as Copenhageners call it), the BYCYKLEN, a touch-screen equipped pedelec with – as we found out – an amazingly powerful electric support.