The Benchmarking of Transport Solutions in Baltic Sea Cities publication is now out. We invite urban mobility planners and visitors of our website to check the best practices and solutions in sustainable urban and peri-urban mobility connected to port areas.

In the HUPMOBILE project, Aalto university carried out an in-depth analysis of the transportation sub-system in each of the participating cities in need of benchmarking information for starting their mobility development activities and compared it to leading port cities. The publication intends to increase the knowledge of traffic planners and authorities in organizing sustainable mobility connected to port areas, bringing new ideas into collaboration with stakeholders, and assessing the most efficient and sustainable approaches in their local context.

The aim is also to highlight the experience gained from the implemented solutions in a format that would be usable for HUPMOBILE partners and the BSR cities in general. For this reason, it mostly focuses on solutions with several years of operational performance that were developed under the EU funded projects as these usually have extensive descriptions of the practices achieved during the project.

The report is not an ordinary benchmark, as it does not strive to compare apples with oranges - the mobility conditions and demands are quite different in HUPMOBILE pilot cities. They vary from, albeit one of the biggest cities of Finland, but still medium-sized Turku with circa 200 thousand inhabitants, to the big cities such as Hamburg with around 2 million inhabitants. Hence, the path dependency in the development and the need for political support in the implementation of sustainable mobility solutions in the partner cities of the project is acknowledged and highlighted.

The report is divided into themes identified in the planning stage of our project. The themes were chosen in a way that would support the pilot activities in HUPMOBILE partner cities:

• Rail transport solutions (in connection to ports) in leading Baltic cities (Turku)
• Different approaches in organizing Mobility-as-a-Service, (Riga, Hamburg, Turku)
• Electrification of transportation in BSR region (Riga)
• Existing logistics solutions (in connection to ports) in Baltic cities (Turku)

The report will still be supplemented with the results of the EU funded projects currently running in these or similar themes. Nevertheless, hopefully already this version of the report would help HUPMOBILE pilot cities in carrying out their activities in the project.

Text by Teemu Surakka, Aalto University