Ricardo AEA to lead EU transport project

Work on behalf of European Commission will look at areas including air quality from city transport networks

Environmental consultancy Ricardo-AEA has been selected by the European Commission to lead a project intended to help European cities to take action to improve the performance of their transport systems.

Ricardo-AEA is to carry out the project on behalf of the European Commission

The four-year project is being carried out on behalf of the Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport, and involves the development of a web-based policy support tool to help city authorities across the EU identify and implement cost effective strategies for address major urban transport challenges, including air quality.

Congestion

Other issues to be addressed as part of the project include traffic congestion, carbon dioxide emissions and accidents.

Ricardo-AEA is to lead the work in partnership with international cities network, ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability, and Italian transport consultants TRT Tranporti e Territorio.

The policy support tool will be designed to enable city authorities to assess a wide range of transport policies. It will also provide users with quantified estimates of the impacts and costs of individual policy measures. In addition, the project will develop five different illustrative policy scenarios for urban transport in the EU to 2030.

These will identify the actions required at the EU, national and local levels to achieve overarching EU policy objectives for cities. These objectives include those set out in the 2011 Transport White Paper such as significantly reducing CO2 and air pollutant emissions from urban transport.

Ricardo-AEA’s practice director for sustainable transport, Sujith Kollamthodi, said: “This ambitious and exciting project aims to help cities take action to tackle Europe’s most pressing urban mobility challenges. The guidance, tools and roadmaps that we will develop will be freely available to all European cities to help achieve outcomes which will last well beyond the lifetime of this project.”