Evaluation of mobility strategies in Helsingborg

The impacts of mobility planning have, in Helsingborg, been evaluated with support from an external auditor. The evaluation report shows that the city is proceeding especially well in order to reach the targets on cycling.

The City of Helsingborg has had different kinds of traffic plans since the 1980s, but a comprehensive traffic strategy was established only in 2005. The traffic strategy is considered to enable a clearer long-term planning of mobility and it has functioned as a good ground for cooperation between politicians and officers. A detailed traffic plan, based on the traffic strategy, was developed in 2006, and these two documents gather together all mobility documents of the municipality, e.g. action plans for public transport, cycling, walking, parking and traffic safety.

The traffic strategy is considered to have had some impact on the city development, together with generally increased interest in sustainability issues and other traffic related aspects like air quality and traffic safety. Especially the possibilities for cycling have improved remarkably since the adoption of the traffic strategy, while the use of public transport is mostly due to a bus vision developed together with bus companies, the municipality and the regional public body of traffic, Skånetrafiken.

In 2012, the city of Helsingborg used an external auditor for analyzing and evaluating how the implementation of the plan and strategy had worked. An actual follow-up on the plans or their consequences had not been made prior to that and it turned out that some goals and progressive steps were challenging to measure since data on the situation before had not been collected. In the evaluation report it is stated that Helsingborg is on a good way to reach the goal mentioned in the traffic strategy and that e.g. cycling has increased by 10 percent (goal 2005-2015: 17 percent) and the use of public transport has increased by 56 percent (goal 2005-2015: 100 percent). Monitoring and evaluation are important tools in the development and implementation of transport plans and strategies that serve the purpose of timely identification of problems, potential successes and the need for readjustment of a plan and its instrument. Based on the progress evaluation report and existing documents on sustainable mobility, a new traffic vision and strategy will be developed in order to attain consecutiveness in the planning.