Challenges on Sustainable Urban Mobility in Cities for the 21st Century

In the last two decades, strategies and plans for the promotion of sustainable mobility have been implemented in many cities, with uneven results. Some proposals, such as the city 15 minutes from Paris, have been very successful and have been exported to various countries, creating a trend. Others, either due to the incapacity of their managers or the lack of interest shown by their citizens or politicians, have fallen into oblivion. However, it is evident that the necessary promotion of sustainable mobility to improve air quality in our increasingly large cities is an unstoppable inertia that will continue to establish itself in the coming years. It is a challenge at the planetary level, since it is not in vain that the UN has declared that in 2050 almost 70% of the population will live in cities. Now that there is a sufficiently broad retrospective in terms of time and case studies, it is necessary to reflect on what the challenges and objectives of this type of urban mobility planning tool should be.

Relevant case studies, new methodologies, innovative approaches, etc. will be addressed in this collection. The objective is to verify how this problem has been addressed in the different countries and which are the most relevant cities currently in this matter. In addition, which are the biggest problems detected for the implementation of this type of urban mobility planning tools will also be analyzed. This Topical Collection seeks to be a sharing of different practical proposals and theoretical approaches, both to determine what is the state of the art in the matter at present, and to contribute to advancing more quickly and decisively to the improvement of planning and urbanization in our cities with the aim of making them more ecological and healthy for their citizens. Also of interest are new strategic approaches to how urban mobility and the design of cities should be planned to reduce the impact of traffic based on the consumption of fossil fuels.

This Article Collection therefore seeks contributions involving relevant experiences and case studies, innovative frameworks, or new analysis methodologies in topics such as:

- Sustainable urban mobility plans (SUMP) case studies

- Low Emission Zones (LEZ) experiences

- Mobility as a Service (MaaS) studies

- Micromobility new challenges

- New approaches on 15-20 minutes cities

- Post Covid-19 new trends on mobility

- Impacts of last-mile urban logistics on the mobility of cities

The Keywords are:

Sustainable transport; Urban mobility; Low emission zones (LEZ); Urban planning