UNDERSTANDING FASTTRACK PROJECT
FastTrack has worked with 23 urban and peri-urban areas to help them accelerate (or ‘fast track’) their development of sustainable mobility innovations. An Ambassador City each led on four topical clusters, one of which focused on sustainable and clean urban logistics.
What is innovative in one local area may be well-established in another. Through knowledge-sharing, capacity-building events, and various research methods, the project has met cities where they are, and supported them all to fast track their transition to sustainable transport.
Over the course of the project, each FastTrack city developed a sustainable mobility deployment plan, where they identified an innovation they wanted to implement in their community. Through a series of five learning sequences and capacity building weeks, cities met and exchanged with one another, diving into topics such as behaviour change, financing, data management, and governance, which helped facilitate the developed of these innovations, learning about factors which can help accelerate implementation.
One city, Ambassador City Stockholm (Sweden), led the sustainable and clean urban logistics cluster and focused their deployment plan on introducing public charging infrastructure for heavy vehicles in Stockholm and its surrounding region.
KEY ACTIVITIES: A success story
The FastTrack project leveraged local knowledge among participating cities to enable a place for exchange. What for some cities may be innovative sustainable mobility solutions, but for others may be for common practice so the FastTrack project created a space to exchange. For the City of Stockholm this innovation involved setting up a charging infrastructure for heavy vehicles.
The main challenge the City experienced concerned a lack of reliable data on traffic movements and heavy vehicles. This meant there were blind spots towards vehicle movements and vehicle “hot-spots”, availability of loading bays, and how such issues relate to charging needs, both with regards to terminal-based charging and for on- or off-street “top-up” charging.
The motivations for setting up this charging infrastructure were a mix of common issues, including congestion, climate change (CO2-reduction and electrification targets), air pollution, noise, social exclusion, and an improved use of urban infrastructure. Through this charging structure, which is seen as innovative at the local level, there exists the opportunity to address specific data gaps and improve planning and better inform decision making in both the public and private sectors. This will help avoid technological lock-ins and poorly informed investment decisions.
The FastTrack project explored specifically the range of stakeholders that can influence the implementation of sustainable mobility innovation. This included suppliers, implementers, funders, locals, and the wider network. For Stockholm in particular, ensuring local political support has been a key acceleration factor for success in implementing their heavy vehicle charging infrastructure.
The City also set up an “Electrification Pact” with all relevant stakeholders, including a working group that identified the needs and possible solutions to accelerate the introduction of the public charging infrastructure for heavy vehicles. As a result, the City has a structured approach for planning and permitting to enable on-street public charging, an awareness strategy to enable the introduction of off-street charging on private properties, and identified that terminal-based charging of heavy vehicles such as buses and vans remains the responsibility of other stakeholders.
Stockholm’s innovation was a defined plan that enables accelerated introduction of public charging infrastructure for heavy vehicles in Stockholm and the surrounding region. The City aimed to accelerate the introduction of this infrastructure by facilitating dialogue and coordinated planning, to ensure that e.g. new charging stations for heavy vehicles are located in ideal locations and enable synergies with or fulfilment of other city objectives (reduce noise pollution and congestion, increase traffic safety).
Stockholm’s approach can be found in the Stockholm Case Study and in more detail in their Innovation Deployment Plan, a framework developed within the FastTrack project. This Framework, as well as examples from 21 FastTrack cities can be found on the FastTrack website. The Deployment Plan Framework template can be found in 17 additional languages for future cities to help plan out the own sustainable mobility innovation deployment.
“As Ambassador City within FastTrack, the main benefit has been the exchange with other cities concerning ambitions, measures, methods and approaches which have partly influenced our thoughts about the deployment process and more generally influenced our discussions concerning implementation.”
Paul Fenton Project Manager for Clean Vehicles Group, City of Stockholm
