On March 27th, Katie Bulanowski participated in the European Mobility Week Workshops in Brussels.

EMW 2025 © European Union 2025 | Laura Jay Nethercott

European Mobility Week is the European Commission’s awareness-raising campaign on sustainable urban mobility. It culminates in a week of activities on 16-22 September every year, including the popular car-free day, and has huge media appeal (around 3.000 cities register per year). The European Mobility Week workshops aim to familiarise the campaign’s national coordinators and their guests from ministries/ cities with the annual theme: “Mobility for Everyone”.

EPF strongly supports this theme, as it aligns with its core objective to support the establishment of user-centric mobility services that are affordable, reliable, sustainable, coordinated and accessible to all. Everyone, regardless of their circumstances, should be able to get comfortably to where they want to go, when they want to go there, and with whichever (combination) of modes they’d like. To make this happen, the transport system needs a greater focus on end-users – including vulnerable to exclusion groups who may be at risk of transport poverty.

In her presentation “Transport Poverty: the users’ perspective”, Katie shared how diverse (and often intersecting) factors such as age, income, living situation, and education can influence people’s mobility choices and result in transport poverty. Katie also highlighted some relevant EPF projects working towards more inclusive and sustainable mobility:

  • The UPPER project is implementing a combination of push and pull measures to positively influence users’ mobility choices. At the same time, the project’s Mobility-as-a-Right (MaaR) strategic vision aims to ensure that all citizens are considered, regardless of their physical and mental capabilities or social and economic background.
  • The InclusiveSpaces project focuses on the inclusive design and evaluation of urban spaces, in terms of accessibility and social cohesion. The project is developing a set of assistive technologies and tools that include, for example, a travel demand data and accessibility evaluation tool, a comfort-based accessibility mapping tool, a routing tool for visually and mobility-impaired individuals, digitised accessibility audits for buildings and public spaces, and a Universal Design Manual for the Built Environment.

Katie’s presentation was followed by Julia Wadoux, Policy Manager at AGE Platform Europe, who dove deeper into the needs of older people and the challenges they often face in their daily mobility.

After an inspiring day, we look forward to discovering how cities are tackling these issues during European Mobility Week in September!

All workshop presentations are available on the European Mobility Week website. We highly recommend reviewing them!

EMW 2025 © European Union 2025 | Laura Jay Nethercott