SUMPs in Germany

The Traffic and transport planning has a long tradition in Germany. In spite of existing cycling strategy and legislation on air quality there is a lack of comprehensive approach to sustainable mobility planning at federal level and no legal obligation for a comprehensive urban mobility plan exists. Nevertheless, there is a quite well-established transport planning framework.

National, federal and local level authorities are sharing responsibility for traffic planning according to the spatial scale that planning is in each case carried out. Obligatory Public Transport Plans and informal Traffic and Transport Development Plans (VEP) are included in the areas of responsibility of the more local level authorities, counties and municipalities. The latter one (VEP) can be almost compared with SUMP and many municipalities have developed their own Transport Development Plan, pursuing a more comprehensive approach, instead of solely infrastructure based planning. Even though some of these plans can already be described as a SUMP, the others are missing some important features of it. Newly (in 2013) published guidelines for the preparation, organisation and implementation of a state-of-the-art strategic mobility planning process by the German road and transport research association is aiming at changing transport planning tradition into more widen form, following the SUMP ideology.

Source: Endurance project