Sweden analyses IMPACT of sustainable mobility
Sweden is a pioneer in sustainable mobility. Not so much at the technical end – coming up with new ideas and technology to improve transport sustainability – although it has a good track record there too, but more at the strategic end. Sweden excels in actually taking the decisions to put often controversial ideas into practice. Initiatives that never get past the discussion stage in some countries, seem to be implemented in Sweden with relatively few problems, usually successfully.
So what better place for a research programme to improve decision making in sustainable mobility?
Can the Swedish improve on something that already works so well?
The IMPACT programme aims to find out why so many measures and policies that could improve sustainable mobility are never put into practice.
Research areas
Programme leader Eva Ericsson of Lund University, explains that, “one of the areas we look at is the role of knowledge and efficient support information. Of course, to be able to implement new things we need knowledge and we need information to support our decisions. But on the other hand, research shows that there is a lot of information that is never actually used. We want to look at why that is. At the same time, there are other situations where information has been used very successfully, so we will look at what we can learn from those examples, too.”
Other areas of research include the relationship between private and public management of sustainable mobility initiatives and its impact. Also, the relationship between different jurisdictions and levels of authority – local, regional, national and EU for example. Finally, how the difficulty in including long term effects in an evaluation affect the implementation of a sustainable transport system. “We want to identify when it is helpful and when it is a barrier. And if it is a barrier, how it could be improved,” says Ericsson about the last issue.
The programme has studied the congestion charging scheme in Stockholm, the UK’s 10-year transport plan, Copenhagen’s experiences around Orestad, the EU Biofuels Directive and packaging giant Tetra Pak – real case studies which form the empirical basis for IMPACT’s research.
Phase one
Phase one of the programme is due to end later this year, to be evaluated and hopefully followed by one further phase over the next four years.
IMPACT is being funded by TransportMistra, part of Mistra, the Swedish government’s Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research.
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