Facts

Contact person:
Robert Hrelja
Financer:
  • Swedish Transport Administration
Responsible at MaU:
Robert Hrelja
Project members at MaU:
External project members:
  • Tom Rye Urban Planning Institute of Slovenia.
Time frame:
24 November 2025 - 01 May 2028
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

Project description

In Sweden, local and regional public transport is planned and procured at the regional level. Planning of local roads, cycleways, road-based public transport infrastructure, walking and spatial planning takes place at the municipal level, often set out in local transport plans. Meanwhile, travel patterns do not respect municipal boundaries and much travel takes place across the region, between municipalities. These longer regional trips accounts for approximately 76% of the personal transportation mileage in Sweden, and thus also for most of the energy use linked to passenger transport (Holmberg & Brundell-Freij, 2012). It is also the part of travel that is increasing the most, making these travels critical for the development of sustainable mobility and functionally cohesive urban and regional areas.

Therefore, there is a pressing need to better integrate transport and land use planning with each other and between the local and regional levels with the aim of increasing travel by sustainable modes of transport while ensuring regional accessibility. Meanwhile, the EU adopted a regulation in 2024 requiring all of Sweden’s 18 ‘urban nodes’ on the trans-European transport network to develop Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) for their functional urban areas – that is, the broadly-defined travel to work area encompassing several municipalities, and not just the central municipality itself. This legal requirement adds to the need to integrate transport and land use planning across administrative and policy boundaries.

The aim of the project is to develop recommendations for how municipalities and regions can enhance collaboration and establish planning processes that achieve integrated transport and land use planning, in a way that enables the urban nodes along Sweden’s TEN-T network to meet the requirements of the new EU legislation.

The project addresses the following research questions:

  1. What are the organisational conditions, and what promotes or hinders the integration of transport and land use planning between municipalities and regions in functionally cohesive urban and regional areas?
  2. How can governance principles and administrative structures be designed to support the integration of transport and land use in functionally cohesive urban and regional areas?
  3. What lessons can be drawn from international examples of integrated transport and land use planning in polycentric regions?
  4. What support mechanisms are needed from the Swedish Transport Administration within the framework of SUMP work?
  5. How can authorities meet the EU’s legal requirement to collect indicators for urban mobility within functional urban areas?