Active mobility—walking, cycling and wheelchair use—is central to the EU’s vision for cleaner, healthier and more liveable cities under the European Green Deal, the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy and the Urban Mobility Framework. When seamlessly linked with public transport, it delivers fast, affordable and inclusive mobility for all. The EUI Policy Lab on Integrated and Active Mobility explores how cities can turn this EU agenda into practice. Building on lessons from EUI, UIA and URBACT projects, it translates policy goals into real-world action and practical guidance for cities across Europe.
About
Active mobility—walking, cycling and wheelchair use, both as standalone trips and as the universal first and last-mile connectors to public transport—offers one of the most immediate, affordable and equitable ways to reduce emissions while improving health, inclusion and urban liveability. Its full potential is realised when it becomes part of an integrated mobility system that coordinates infrastructure, services, data and governance across functional urban areas. Within this system, public transport functions as the high-capacity backbone, while streets and interchanges are designed to ensure safety, legibility and universal access for all users.
This approach is now embedded within the European Union’s political and financial frameworks. The European Green Deal, the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy and the Urban Mobility Framework have placed active mobility and first and last-mile integration at the centre of the transition to climate-neutral transport. The revised TEN-T Regulation gives this ambition concrete form, requiring 431 urban nodes to adopt and monitor Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) by 2027 and to ensure access to active and public transport by 2030. At the same time, the 2021–2027 Cohesion Policy channels approximately €18 billion into sustainable urban mobility, covering walking and cycling networks, multimodal hubs, zero-emission fleets and digital traffic management systems. When national co-funding is included, cycling investments alone are expected to reach nearly €4.7 billion. The EU Declaration on Cycling, the Social Climate Fund and the EU Mission on 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 further reinforce this direction, providing both a strong political mandate and the financial means for cities to deliver safe, inclusive and multimodal transport systems. Together, these measures signal a decisive shift towards people-centred mobility across Europe’s cities.
Background and reports
The EUI Policy Lab on Integrated and Active Mobility comes at a pivotal moment. Mobility—and particularly active mobility—has emerged as a top priority for cities across Europe, as confirmed by the European Urban Initiative’s 2024 Forward-Looking Survey. While the reasons and objectives for promoting active mobility are well understood, the Policy Lab focuses on the crucial question of how to make this happen in practice: how to move from pilots to citywide, integrated systems that make walking and cycling natural, accessible and attractive choices for everyone.
Building on the experiences of cities supported through Urban Innovative Actions, the European Urban Initiative and URBACT, the Policy Lab will translate practical lessons into evidence-based guidance for replication and scaling. Its objective is to bridge the gap between high-level European policy ambitions and the everyday realities of implementation at the city level. By doing so, it seeks to provide city authorities, practitioners and managing authorities with the tools and insights needed to mainstream active mobility within integrated transport systems.
The study looks in particular at how cities can ensure that mobility systems are safe, affordable and universally accessible; how data and technology can support decision-making and integration; how behavioural change can be encouraged and maintained; and what governance, financial and structural barriers limit progress. Through these interlinked perspectives, the Policy Lab explores the enablers that allow cities to embed walking and cycling into a coherent, intermodal framework that meets diverse needs across urban, peri-urban and rural contexts.
The Policy Lab is an eight-month study running from August 2025 to March 2026. It follows a stepwise process that begins with a comprehensive review of more than 150 European projects on urban mobility, narrowing the focus to a shortlist of 30 cities and ultimately to 10–12 detailed case studies. It combines desk research with direct engagement, including a structured questionnaire, online thematic hearings and interactive focus groups with participating cities. Knowledge exchange and validation are central to the process, notably through the EU City Lab on Active Mobility, organised jointly with URBACT on 28–29 October 2025, and through a series of public focus groups designed to test interim findings and refine conclusions.
The study is carried out by Rupprecht Consult on behalf of the European Urban Initiative, under the strategic oversight of the EUI Permanent Secretariat and in consultation with the European Commission. The final report, to be published in March 2026, will compile case studies and offer practical, evidence-based recommendations that cities can use to accelerate the uptake of active mobility within integrated transport systems. All outputs will be made available through PORTICO, the EUI’s knowledge and learning platform, supporting cities and managing authorities in translating the European vision for sustainable, inclusive and climate-neutral mobility into tangible action.
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