An Integrated Planning for Cities to Promote Sustainable Mobility

Abstract

Mobility is a determinant factor in a sustainable urban development. Consequently, the growing dependence on private vehicles and the resulting traffic congestion problems become bottlenecks on the cities functional systems and act negatively on its citizen’s life quality. Improving urban sustainable mobility is a fundamental step to promote the global urban environment quality, also acting as an incentive for the economic growth. This paper looks at strategies to manage urban mobility, given the trade off among the goals of accessibility and environmental quality of urban spaces. The study area is the city of Santarem, a medium size city within Portugal. This size (about 60000 inhabitants) is adequate for the implementation of sustainable mobility strategies in an integrated and combined framework, where the concentration of urban activity and people’s movements, characteristic of this city, reinforce the success of these strategies. The proposals that came out from the Sustainable Mobility Project in Santarem, become fundamental contributions in the city’s transport and urban policies and actions, on the level of priority adjustments and on the level of technical skills, in the different solutions proposed. There was also a fundamental contribution for a better cooperation between several City Council Departments, and between the City Council (local knowledge) and the engineering school (scientific knowledge). This is a fundamental condition for the accomplishment of the urban mobility multidisciplinary nature. In this paper, special attention is devoted to the way this project promoted the local mobility paradigm change - the development of a supply in multimodal possibilities in the central city public space.