A participatory approach has become one of the basic characteristics of sustainable urban mobility planning. Institutional cooperation and participation are continuous activities that should start early during the SUMP process definition phase. This webinar will help you - (city) SUMP planning professionals - to:  

1. basically understand better how communication and participation work
2. become acquainted with the principles and concepts of stakeholder participation and citizen involvement in the development of SUMPs.
3. comprehend the role of drivers, challenges and common practises of ‘good’ participatory processes
4. finally, raise participation in SUMP a level higher. 

Bridging the gap between SUMP-theory and practice is already a difficult exercise. Translating this in a clear and attractive political message seems even more so. Carl Hanssens, vice-mayor for mobility of Sint-Niklaas talks from own experience on how a careful and thought-through stakeholder management process helped convey a positive political message and simultaneously built political buy-in for the write-up and execution of the city's SUMP. Learn more on how in this webinar.

In this webinar it will be shown how public transport authorities, companies and operators communicate with their users.There are several different behaviours how to interact clients:

• professional, perfect and user friendly approaches using all communication channels and involving passengers as real customers, working in a mutual context, from company to user and from user to company in an equal level
• medium level  communication forms, giving a general overview and a level of the information, mostly from authority or from operator to the user but not in the opposite way
• low level communication, giving the really basic information on services, considering users as the necessary bad players of the public transport 

Many examples will be described in order to understand the geopolitical frameworks, the relations between the financial, operational, cultural situation and the communication approaches. Some of them will show, a good communication is not necessarily the question of financing, but more the question of customer-friendly  approaches. Proactive branding for getting new users and maintaining the existing ones is an important approach to place public transport in a right position among the competition of mobility modes and services. It needs a recognition from the cities and authorities. In case of lacking this recognition, communication cannot be really efficient.

How do you decide which measures to include in your SUMP to achieve your objectives and fit with your policies?  This webinar will set out some straightforward ways to do this, so that your SUMP ultimately contains an package of measures that are implementable but also effective.  It will cover in particular the purpose and setting of policies, and multi-criteria analysis.

This webinar will demystify monitoring and evaluation in SUMPs, explaining in simple terms what to measure and how, and how to set meaningful targets, giving real life examples from actual SUMPs.  The overall message will be that monitoring and evaluation is simpler than you might expect and does not always require gathering large amounts of data.