Energy efficient urban transport - A summary of the SusTrans roundtable meetings in the V4 region

As part of the “Cooperation for sustainable transport in the V4 region”, an international project supported by the International Visegrad Fund, four national level roundtable meetings were organised during the spring and summer of 2012. The main theme of these roundtable discussions was “Energy efficient urban transport”, and the purpose was to initiate communication among the various transport decision makers and stakeholders in each country. The analysis of the national transport strategies in the V4 countries (which forms a part of this same project) have shown that the concept of energy efficiency is poorly represented in the field of national transport decision making, or if the fundamental documents do contain several references to energy efficiency, in practice it is hardly a predominant influencing factor.

In order to identify on the one hand why such a lack of attention can be experienced in connection with this important issue, and on the other hand to shed light on all the positive initiatives that have already appeared in each country’s urban transport, roundtable discussions have been organised throughout the four countries. These meetings have been conducted according to a very similar methodology and the topic has been discussed along the same guidelines and among the same kind of decision makers and stakeholders.

This downloadable document contains the summary and the evaluation of the four roundtable meetings, which serve with valuable practical information on how to facilitate the integration of energy efficiency and on a larger scale sustainability into the urban transport systems of the V4 region.