Global Roadmap of Action Toward Sustainable Mobility (GRA)

What is the GRA?

How can countries and cities attain their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and improve the sustainability of their transport sector? How can they prioritize action based on their performances on mobility and accelerate progress? These questions are at the heart of “Global Roadmap of Action toward Sustainable Mobility” (GRA)—an ambitious and comprehensive effort led by the SuM4All coalition to identify the most relevant and impactful policy measures to achieve sustainable mobility, based on a country’s context.

The GRA, in focusing on the “how to”, emerges as a natural complement to the Global Mobility Report 2017 (GMR 2017) that addressed the “what” factors and established the imperative for urgent action on mobility around the world. There have been many attempts in the past to develop programs of action, action plans and policy frameworks. The GRA is unique in several respects:

• The GRA will propose a coherent and integrated menu of policy actions to attain the SDGs and achieve the four policy goals that define sustainable mobility (i.e., universal access, efficiency, safety and green mobility). Too often in the past, policy programs and action plans were devised with one policy goal in mind (e.g., road safety decade of action), or with only one mode of transportation. This approach resulted in incremental progress on certain facets of transport, but never achieved the much-needed systemic transformation of mobility.
• The GRA will define a path for countries to follow to attain the SDGs and achieve the four policy goals that define sustainable mobility. This path consists of a series of action plans to be implemented over time depending on progress on mobility. It takes the view that a one-size-fits-all model is ineffective; policy actions on mobility should be tailored according to where countries stand relative to the four policy goals, and more importantly the policy objectives of the countries themselves.
• The GRA will embody the collective knowledge of all 55 Member organizations and 180 experts, having received the feedback of more than 50 decision makers in cities and countries including transport ministers, city mayors, and public transport operators, and 25 large private corporations. The GRA will be complemented by six companion papers that provide in-depth policy analyses by policy goal, and it will represent the best knowledge that we have at our disposal on policies that can move mobility into a sustainable direction.

What are the contributions of the GRA?

The GRA will make three important contributions to the policy agenda on mobility:

• It will chart mobility performances of 180 developed and developing countries, providing a classification of all countries in the world into four groups according to their performance on the sustainable mobility scale.
• It will provide a catalogue of suitable policy measures that have been used and tested around the world to achieve any of the four policy goals. This policy framework consists of 183 policy measures. Six case studies (Ethiopia, Colombia, Sweden, Spain, China and Europe and Central Asia) will show how some of these policy measures have been implemented to make progress on mobility.
• It will develop a methodology to extract from the catalogue of policy measures those measures that are both most impactful and relevant within a country’s context. Those policy measures form a prototype action plan consisting of nearly 20 top policy actions for a country to prioritize, given its current mobility performances. The GRA will rely on a scoring approach to filter the catalogue of policy measures. Each policy measure will be assigned two scores: an impact score to measure the impact on each of the four policy goals, and a country-relevance score to measure the relevance of this policy measure by country group. Prototype action plans are derived by selecting those measures that have the highest scores on both impact and country relevance.

A by-product of the GRA will be a web-based tool that will make the policy framework easily available and usable for policy making and dedicated to decision makers and practitioners in the field. This tool will enable its users to derive and customize a series of action plans tailored to their country’s performances on mobility.

How was the GRA developed?

The GRA has been developed through an iterative process to ensure its relevance and practicality. It has involved all member organizations making their knowledge available to the platform. Policy decision makers at the country and city levels have engaged on various drafts and to share their experiences, and more than 25 large corporations were questioned on constraints in the enabling environment to innovate and create the solutions of the future. It also involved donors supporting this effort over an 18-month period (The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and the Michelin Foundation).