From 4 to 6 April 2017, the City of Warsaw will host the Peer Review and RESOLVE Project Meeting Group 3.
Mobility experts and staff members coming from each project partner will gather in Poland for these 2 important events.
BACKGROUND
At the end of 2016, the City of Warsaw finished working on a new strategic document, called “Warsaw Sustainable Mobility Policy”. It continues and develops the Sustainable Transportation Strategy reaching out to the year 2015. The main aim is to improve the quality of life, strengthen the city’s competitiveness and attractiveness as well as to mitigate the influence of mobility onto the environment, especially the air quality.
A new approach is applied in the document. Stronger emphasis is put on the soft activities and projects, especially on educational and promotional ones. The purpose is to make the citizens understand the importance of sustainable urban mobility and to encourage them to change their travel behaviors.
One of the important goals is to reshape urban landscape and to reintroduce retail and leisure in the city center. Selected areas will be rearranged (temporarily or permanently) and the space so far used for car traffic will now be dedicated to other purposes. These activities will be comprehensive and coherent with other projects such as a new tenancy policy or social policy.
PEER REVIEW
The City of Warsaw has no significant experience in the implementation of traffic restricted zones as well as in reshaping public spaces in a larger area. Until now, most projects have involved single streets or squares, e.g. Swietokrzyska street (rearranged after the underground second line investment).
Attractive streets which are in different parts of the City center very often have little or no connection to each other. During the Peer Review, experts will discuss the possibilities to create a lively, vibrant retail and leisure area based on each such street’s potential, together with squares and also shopping malls.
City of Warsaw is aware that the citizens are usually skeptical about such ideas. Both citizens and retail sector strongly believe that reducing road capacity will deteriorate the quality of life in the city. Moreover, it is commonly held that cutting the amount of parking space would aggravate the retailers’ economic situation, especially in the streets in the city centre. There is a high need of improving the quality of the dialogue between City authorities and stakeholders on every stage of investment process.
Follow the news section on this website for more info about the results of the peer review and PMG3!
