Sustainable urban mobility: One definition, different stakeholders' opinions

During recent decades, the debate on how to sustain urban mobility has accelerated. Transport decision-making has been more reflective of sustainability issues and quality of life in cities; this process has especially accelerated with the setting of modern urban mobility planning concepts, substantially focusing on transport demand regulation and management, and Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans taking over the role of cities' primary transport-related strategic documents. The approaches to sustainable mobility visioning and planning differ within cities, as do their key stakeholders' opinions. Our research aims to reveal the main shared viewpoints on the preferred paths towards sustainable urban mobility. We use the Q method, which is a statistical method to study subjectivity. It enables determination of characteristic shared viewpoints on a particular subject. A qualitative analysis assessing subjective opinions is combined with the quantitative approach of a factor analysis of statements ranked by respondents. The study was undertaken on 36 carefully selected stakeholders situated within the Czech Republic. Our results indicate that even stakeholders sharing the same definition of sustainable urban mobility may substantially differ in regard to their ideas on how to achieve it. Furthermore, we show that some of the attitudes expressed and measures appreciated by our respondents would not be recognised as sustainable by environmentalists. There is still a wide gap between sustainable mobility theory and its implementation in practice. All these findings represent barriers to sustainable mobility development in urban areas. Therefore, the paper also conveys relevant policy implications.