“Mobility policies should be decided at a local level”

Mr Sylvain Haon is the executive director of transport innovation network Polis. The network has more than seventy members from seventeen European countries, exclusively from the public sector.

Subsidiarity
“Europe’s governments, and that includes the European Commission, should not tell local authorities what they should do, or which mobility policies they should implement,” says Sylvain. “Instead, they should help them to make sure they have the tools and frameworks in place to implement the policies they choose in the best possible way. It ought not to be a case of the EU telling cities ‘you should all have congestion charges’; rather the EU should ensure the conditions are right to make congestion charging as effective as possible if a city wants to do it.”

It is the question whether the EU is telling cities to instate congestion charges. Anyway, Mr Haon is an advocate of the subsidiarity principle, that much is certain.

Activities
Polis was established in 1989. Its activities include helping to organise member projects, advising on funding, coordinating working groups to encourage collaboration, and disseminating information through newsletters and websites. It also acts as an intermediary between its members and industry, non-governmental organisations and research centres, promoting their activities.

The projects it is involved with are as diverse as the promotion of measures to influence transport demand, or the development of automated transport systems.

From idea to project
“We are guided by our members,” Sylvain explains. “They come to us with their ideas and priorities, on which we exchange knowledge and experience in our working groups. We also help to develop these ideas into projects.

"In the latter case”, he continues, “we often play a role in organising communication with other cities and regions across Europe, on well-defined topics and using specific tools. An example of such a tool is the SILENCE Practitioner Handbook for Local Noise Action Plans to support transport noise abatement in cities.”

Notable
One of Polis’s most notable projects is Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems or CVIS. It is a traffic management initiative to allow vehicles to communicate with road networks through ‘intelligent cooperative systems’ that utilise wi-fi and cellular networks.

Historically, innovations in this area have been connected either to the vehicles themselves or to road systems. CVIS aims to connect the two. This means providing ways for drivers to interact with their surroundings and vice versa. Traffic management systems will then be able to pinpoint vehicles’ exact locations and trajectories and provide users with up-to-the-minute traffic information and advice. At the same time they will be monitoring driving patterns and behaviour in order to reduce congestion.

Favourite
Asked if he has a favourite among Polis’s projects, Sylvain is emphatic. The ‘NICHES+’ project provides support to seven European cities to bring sustainable urban transport innovations out of their ‘niche’ position and into the mainstream. Amongst the innovative urban transport concepts are: ‘travel training’ for public transport, mobile travel information services (real-time traffic information made available through mobile devices) and – maybe somewhat less innovative – enhanced cycling facilities at transport interchanges.

Participating cities are: Artois-Gohelle (France), Burgos (Spain), Glasgow (UK), Warsaw (Poland), Trondheim (Norway), Cork (Ireland) and Daventry (UK).

Empowering
“The purpose of NICHES+ is to support the development of innovative transport concepts in champion cities, identifying those which have the best potential to be deployed to greatest effect on a large scale,” says Sylvain.

And he continues: “It is these kinds of pioneering projects that need the full support of government to get from planning to actual implementation. National governments, and the European Commission itself, can play a key role in empowering local authorities to add innovation to their urban transport agendas – along with optimising ‘classic’ urban transport solutions.”