Sustainable small town transports; learnings from a network project

Panel: 4. Mobility, transport, and smart and sustainable cities

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Author:
Björn Svensby, Swedish Energy Agency, Department for energy efficiency, Sweden

Abstract

The project “Vehicle efficient planning in vibrant small towns” ran between 2011 and 2014. It was a part of the programme Sustainable municipality, in which 37 Swedish municipalities cooperated with the Swedish Energy Agency in order to produce cutting edge examples of sustainability work at the municipal level.

The objective of the project was to find ways to handle a common challenge for small towns in Sweden; a high degree of car dependency. This car dependency can be traced back to a multitude of factors. One important explanation is a wide spread influence of functionalism in the spatial planning. As a consequence, many Swedish towns, communities and cities are planned around traffic systems in which the car is central. Sprawl is common, even in smaller towns.

Given this, walking and bicycling make up relatively small parts of the total transportation in Swedish towns. Public transport has also difficulties to attract travellers, as the low density usually makes it hard to run bus lines with the necessary frequency to win over car drivers.

In the project, eight municipalities formed a network group. A common denominator of the municipalities was their limited population; between approx. 15 000 – 30 000 inhabitants. Apart from that, the municipalities came from different parts of the country and had diverse prerequisites in terms of i.e. economic situations and/or closeness to economically strong regions.

The municipalities worked with different projects in their own municipalities in order to find approaches to the high car usage. Among the measures being made were bicycle promotion, creation of sustainable transport plans and work with systematic process change within the municipal organisation.

The presentation will sum up the results and learnings from the project, and highlight the most interesting of these. As many countries have similar challenges, special focus will be put on solutions that are not specific for Sweden, but that can be duplicated in other countries.