The SUMP planning approach has been established as an EC urban mobility policy instrument with proven success among European cities, and one that underpins most funding and financing decisions. However, some issues remain, in particular in relation to policy coherence between the overall SUMP ambitions and the measures actually funded and implemented. In practice, the way that SUMP measures are funded, through nationally or EC funded projects, can lead to cities adopting a fragmented, project-by-project approach to implementation. To achieve EU climate goals, cities urgently need to ensure they have detailed strategies in place for how to successfully implement their sets of SUMP priority policy measures.
The SUMP-PLUS Implementation Strategy approach consists of two parts:
- Implementation planning – a recommended process for planning policy measure implementation in a sequential series of four steps, to produce a list of refined core measure packages, an implementation timeline and a spatial overview of implementation. Combined, these elements form an ‘implementation plan’.
- Implementation management – a flexible set of organisational approaches for managing measure implementation, with a particular focus on integration between SUMPs and major transport scheme funding, and the achievement of additional benefits through the accelerated delivery of complementary supporting measures.
The development of a SUMP-Implementation Strategy is being applied in the SUMP-PLUS City Labs in Klaipeda and Alba Iulia.