Plans

since it takes a considerable amount of time to develop plans, apart from involving many actors, citizens, and stakeholders in the process. Hence, they might not have been able to incorporate the guidelines into their planning process on time.

Figure 7. Publication years . Source: Author Furthermore, twenty-one mobility/transport plans have been created/updated in the past ten years, and 2019 was the year that published more plans, six in total. Although the SUMP concept and guidelines are new, most EU capitals have been trying to embrace its approach in their strategic documents and urban development. One of the main reasons gas emissions (European Union, 2022). Hence, changing the old-fashioned car-centric vision toward more sustainable transport modes has been one of the most pressing challenges for the EU lately.

After all, EU capitals have been playing an essential role in changing the mobility paradigm. Thus, this research has selected five cases among the twenty-seven previously shown to

deepen the analysis through the processes built in their strategic documents and potential mobility paradigm transition. The requirements to select the cases were based on:

i. Author s knowledge of the available languages of the documents, which are limited to Portuguese, English, French, Spanish and Italian ii. Preferably for the most recent documents, i.e., 2019 onwards, to do a fair SUMPs analysis, since the 1

st

guidelines were launched in 2013 and it takes a considerable time to develop a plan iii. Diversity in European Regions to have a better comprehension of European multiculturalism and avoid a regional singular perspective; for that, the author has considered the World Factbook (CIA, 2022)

After that, the selection of the five case studies, based on Appendix A, was Brussels (Western Europe), Tallinn (Eastern Europe), Budapest (Central Europe), Rome (Southern Europe), and Lisbon (Southwestern Europe). However, Tallinn is a small city compared to the other four metropolises cases; it has only 438,341 inhabitants (Statistics Estonia, 2021). Thus, the author decided it would be more relevant to this research to exchange it with another city to make a fair comparison between the cases. Under those circumstances, Vienna has been chosen to replace Tallinn since its city (Figure 8) and metropolitan (Figure 9) population numbers are closer to the other selected cities.

Although Vienna s mobility plan was published in 2014 (Vienna City Administration, 2014a), it follows the SUMP guidelines. Besides, the city has received many urban mobility recognitions over time. For instance, Vienna won the European Mobility Week Award for larger municipalities in 2017 (EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK, 2022b), apart from being among the three finalists for the European Mobility Week Award in 2014 and the 4

th

SUMP Award in 2016 (Eltis, 2016). Thus, it should be a great example to be analyzed as a case study through this thesis. Henceforth, the following subsections present the state-of-the-art of five selected case studies (Vienna, Brussels, Budapest, Rome, and Lisbon), describing their mobility scenarios.