Kraków: Testing the new SUMP Self-Assessment Tool
The Metropolitan Association of Kraków represents 14 municipalities, including the Municipality of Kraków and the small commune Skáwina, both of whom have recently begun co-operating in the LOW-CARB project. On May 27th 2019, stakeholders from the three institutions in the Kraków Functional Urban Area (FUA), Kraków Transport Authority, Skáwina, and the Metropolitan Association Kraków came together to test LOW-CARB’s new update of the SUMP Self-Assessment tool. This is an important output and huge success for LOW-CARB as the creation and implementation of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans is a cornerstone of the European Commission’s Urban Mobility Package to harmonize and integrate sustainable mobility across the EU.
The SUMP Self-Assessment Tool has been designed to enable ambitious and forward-thinking planning authorities to quickly assess the compliance of their mobility plan with the European Commission’s SUMP guidelines.
The self-assessment of a region’s SUMP allows stakeholders to uniquely assess where they can improve their planning processes by means of a questionnaire. LOW-CARB recently modified the tool from its previous version to now include queries about municipalities where no SUMPs exist yet. It was an important goal of LOW-CARB to include a Central European perspective into the tool, as it was formerly aimed at cities with SUMPs already in place. However, SUMP roll-out in CE has been sporadic and is not yet very widespread, and the Self-Assessment Tool needed to take that into consideration. It is now able to analyze and offer answer categories for cities and functional urban areas with little or no experience in sustainable urban mobility planning, and is therefore inclusive of municipalities with little experience in inter-municipal cooperation at the FUA level. The tool will also be translated into different Central European languages to allow for its widespread usage across CE.
Pictured from left:Marcin Wojcik (ZTP Kraków), Maciej Zacher (Skáwina Municipality) , Marlene Damerau (Rupprecht Consult), Sarah Frimmel (LVB), Pawel Guzek (Kraków Metroplitan Association), Wolfgang Backhaus (Rupprecht Consult), Lukasz Franek (ZTP Kraków)
Since Kraków and the surrounding smaller communes have not yet created a SUMP and have had little cooperation with each other in regards to sustainable mobility, this offered a great opportunity to test the readiness of the modified self-assessment tool with different stakeholders of the same FUA before it will be made publicly available. We are happy to report that the trial was a great success! A key objective of the tool is to initiate communication between different stakeholders, and the workshop strongly demonstrated its capability to do this! The structure of the questionnaire initiated an open, friendly and fact-based dialogue on topics about air pollution, traffic congestion, low-emission zones, bike lanes, and B&R / P&Rs. Very soon, more questions about differences in quality standards and indicators for decision-making came up within the small group. The test session led the stakeholders to a decision to organize a workshop together with all of the 14 municipalities of Krakow’s FUA, so that they may discuss and apply what they identified using the self-assessment tool, and all-together build a joint-vision and perhaps a common framework or even a SUMP for the FUA and each municipalities’ sustainable mobility agendas.
05.07.2019 - Header photo taken by Ostap Senyuk
