Quest
Quality Management Tool for Urban Energy efficient Sustainable Transport
The overall goal is to set up a quality management tool for sustainable urban mobility for all European cities. The focus in the QUEST project is on midsized cities (50.000 – 300.000 inhabitants). These city types have a lot of problems to organise traffic in an sustainable way. Other than bigger cities they often don’t have the capacity/knowledge to prepare and implement sustainable mobility plans.
In the QUEST project we are developing an audit tool to evaluate and improve the quality of urban sustainable transport in 50 cities. At the end of a QUEST audit cities receive a QUEST quality label which recognises the efforts in sustainable urban transport planning. In the future this labelling system can form the basis for investment programs from different policy levels to support local authorities (cfr. BYPAD). QUEST is building further on experiences with existing quality management tools for urban transport and environment like BYPAD, MEDIATE, EMAS, … and recognises the existing EU-frameworks for sustainable urban transport planning which were for instance developed in PILOT.
QUEST is however more than giving a quality label to cities. The main aim is to support cities in actually making progress. Depending on the present quality level on sustainable urban transport (= audit) a tailor made improvement program for urban mobility policy is set up (certifying process). QUEST distinguishes three types of improvement programs:
starters, climbers and champions.
The intensity of the improvement program is directly linked to the present quality level of sustainable urban mobility. Effort is being focused primarily on starter cities and secondary on climber cities. Champion cities have sufficient experience in sustainable mobility to come up with adequate improvements themselves. Within QUEST they act as an inspiration and a role model for other cities. But also the champion cities are confronted with each other to further improve themselves.
Going further on commitment of more than 50 cities from all over Europe who want to implement the QUEST audit it is clear that there is a high demand of direct advice on urban mobility planning by many EU-cities. The QUEST project is an answer to this demand and will combine European expertise and knowledge to improve local urban mobility policies. http://www.quest-project.eu