SUMPs for BSR

Mobility planning works best if a city can turn the vision into decisions, measure the changes, and adjust the plan along the way. For many small and mid-sized cities in the Baltic Sea Region, this is a practical challenge. Limited staff, fragmented data and gaps in monitoring can make it difficult to understand mobility patterns, assess measures and manage a Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) as a continuous planning process.

With support from Interreg Baltic Sea Region, SUMPs for BSR brought cities, universities and research organisations together to make that process more practical, with particular attention to walking and cycling. Eight partners from seven countries worked as a joint testing and learning network. City experiences fed into common tools, and the tools were refined through local validation, peer exchange and expert support.

At the centre of the project is an integrated monitoring and evaluation package. The Monitoring and Evaluation Framework explains how to build a realistic local monitoring system; the M&E Plan Template helps organise objectives, indicators, data sources, responsibilities and reporting; and the Indicator Selector Tool helps municipalities choose from more than 200 potential indicators based on their local needs and capacity. The project also produced a Model for experimenting with active mobility measures and a report on tested approaches for collecting data on active modes, helping cities connect small-scale testing with longer-term planning.

The practical work showed why this combination matters. Six partner cities tested active-mobility data collection in real urban settings, using methods ranging from sensors and AI-supported cameras to surveys, apps, observations and citizen engagement. Their experiences showed that no single data source gives a complete picture and that technology works best when combined with clear objectives, local knowledge and dialogue. Cities also tested different measures promoting active mobility ranging from educational campaigns and incentives to establishing a neighbourhood mobility hub, temporary bicycle paths and improved bicycle parking. These small-scale experiments also gave cities a structured way to test measures, evaluate results and decide whether an approach should be adapted, continued or scaled.

Capacity building turned these lessons into resources that other cities can use. The project delivered a five-module online SUMP training programme and tailored SUMP Clinic support for five cities. The Baltic Sea Region SUMP Competence Centre now brings the project’s tools, training materials, city cases and wider SUMP resources together in one place.

By connecting local experimentation with shared methods and transnational learning, SUMPs for BSR provides cities a practical route from planning to evidence, from evidence to decisions, and from individual city experience to knowledge that can be scaled across the Baltic Sea Region.