Reflection of the sustainable urban mobility paradigm shift in teaching at three European universities

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the urban transport planning framework has changed significantly towards sustainable mobility planning. It brings new requirements for the education of transport experts. In the paper, we discuss the future of academic education concerning these changes based on case studies of two prestigious technical faculties in Germany and Poland and a social science faculty in Czechia offering study programmes related to sustainable urban mobility planning. We applied a self-assessment questionnaire to investigate how the study programmes prepare future mobility managers and present the concept of sustainable mobility to students. Our results show that the existing study programmes do not cover all steps of sustainable urban mobility plan development. We identified a few gaps common to the technical and social science faculties, such as consensus-seeking knowledge and methods, monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches, and the development of soft skills (presentation and communication skills and stakeholder involvement techniques).