The mentoring programs of the Urban Transports are entering a key phase: first assessments, field work and second round of peer to peer meetings between replicators and pioneers.

Over the last weeks, the replicating cities selected by the Urban Transports Mentoring Call have intensified their activity by participating in taylored working meetings, peer to peer sessions with their pioneers, or revising the first assessments drafted by the mentoring experts. You can follow @MEDCommTrans to discover more about past and upcoming developments of the 8 mentoring programs. 

For the case of Castelló de la Plana and Irbid, both replicators coordinated by MedCities, thing are getting real. Castelló, through Planifica, a cooperative supporting the city in implementing its Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan goals, the idea is to better monitor the modal split to understand how its population moves. Their interest also lies on traffic monitoring and the impacts of changes to the transport network in the city. After the first working meeting and a first bilateral meeting with the municipality of Koper (May 2021), the mentoring experts are now drafting the assessment of how the city could take stock of the technologies available in the market to improve its knowledge about modal split and traffic in the city. 

In Irbid the attention is put on rethinking how to organise the different modes of transport along a central axis of the city that faces great safety, congestion and pollution problems. The city was able to exchange directly with its pioneer city, Thessaloniki, at the occasion of the first bilateral meeting held in May, and will soon be participating at the second round of meetings early July with a focus on the participatory processes needed to generate ownership on the low carbon solutions the city wants to put forward. The mentoring expert and Irbid’ technical team are now preparing the field work in order to gather data about the axis’ urban characteristics and the local population’s behaviours when moving around the pilot area. 

More to come in the next months, follow the Urban Transports Twitter account and subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.