Sustainable urban mobility indicators are a useful tool for cities and urban areas to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their mobility system and to focus on areas for improvement. As cities and urban areas continue to develop Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) and work towards EU policy goals, it is important for this progress to be documented to ensure that such achievements become visible.
The European Commission has therefore developed a comprehensive set of practical and reliable indicators that support cities to perform a standardised evaluation of their mobility system and to measure improvements that result from new mobility practices or policies.
To support cities with the application of this sustainable mobility indicator set, an e-course is available free of charge.
The Indicator Set
The indicator set comprises the following indicators:
Indicators 1 to 13 are defined as core indicators, while indicator 14-18 are regarded as non-core indicators. This differentiation indicates which indicators the European Commission considers of particular strategic importance.
As Indicator Modal split constitutes an important parameter for the calculation of several of the indicators above, also a spreadsheet to calculate modal split is provided.
Please click on an indicator above to receive indicator-specific definitions, information about the parameters for the calculation of the overall indicator score, how-to guidelines and to download the indicator calculation spreadsheet.
To download the entire indicator set all at once click here.
Some further general guidelines for calculating the indicators are included in the "Harmonisation Guidelines" document.
An indicator set for cities outside of Europe is provided by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Their indicator set was the basis for the development of the SUMI indicator set above, which was specifically adapted for European cities.
The Benchmarking Tool
The indicator results of several cities can be used to benchmark one city’s score against the average or median performance of other cities. This functionality is not meant to spark hostile comparisons but to facilitate the setting of ambitious but realistic targets for each city.
To do justice to the different context conditions of every city, the Benchmarking Tool can also be used to show a comparison with cities of a similar population size.
To use the Benchmarking Tool, simply fill in the respective indicator spreadsheet (see above) and upload it below.
Disclaimer: By uploading your data you are granting the European Commission permission to include the data in the benchmarking tool at a later stage. The data protection rules, as stated below, remain valid.
A Note on Data Protection
During the SUMI project (2017-2020),a group of almost 50 pilot cities has voluntarily filled in and submitted a total of 473 indicator spreadsheets. These formed the initial basis for the database underlying the Benchmarking Tool. All cities have agreed to this usage of their data under the condition that no individual score can be publicly identified for a specific city.
This is the reason why the Benchmarking Tool only provides the minimum, maximum, average and median score for each indicator. It also shows which cities have submitted data for a specific indicator without disclosing a specific city’s score. In cases where the number of scores for a certain indicator is particularly low, the amount of details disclosed in the Benchmarking Tool is further reduced. This is to prevent conclusions that would violate a city’s data privacy.
The more cities submit their spreadsheet, the bigger the underlying database gets and the more representative the benchmarking information gets. For all cities, which submit their data in indicator spreadsheets, the same level of data protection applies. Concretely: Neither the European Commission nor the site administrator (acting on behalf of the European Commission) will ever release city-specific indicator scores. The data will only be used to facilitate cross-city benchmarking and to understand, as a strategic policy approach, the general situation with regards to sustainable urban mobility in Europe.