Urban quality improvement programs in the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan of Valencia (Spain)

Abstract

The current challenge of Spanish town-planning is to change wrong land planning practices adopted in the past, based in extensive developments, without considering their environmental impacts. The environmental audits point to mobility as one of the main reasons of unsustainability. Urban transport implanted nowadays generates high fossil fuel consumption and expensive management costs; it increases atmospheric and acoustic pollution and deteriorates the urban quality of life, regarding road safety, public health and increasing spaces for cars; it almost causes social exclusion and city barriers for disadvantaged groups.At the beginning of 2000, Central Administration offered the proper tool for developing sustainable mobility policies in townships: Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP), which some of the main cities of the country are promoting, as Getafe (2007), Segovia (2008), León (2009), Irún (2010), Salamanca and Córdoba (2011) Granada and Valencia (2013). Valencia SUMP contents include several pedestrian programs to recover urban quality of life: old quarter mobility plan, main pedestrian itineraries project, urban centers development, 30Kmph-zones, superblocks design and safe pedestrian ways to schools and accessibility for disabled people. The public participation plan is demonstrating that citizens are taking an interest in urban quality programs in Valencia; as far as they trust the local council investments revert to their city quality improvement, with a view to saving resources and creating economic and tourism assets that bring full employment.