Promoting sustainable and climate-friendly urban mobility (SMMR)

Context

Half of the 669 million citizens of ASEAN’s Member States live in rapidly growing cities. As a result, urban mobility needs are growing, and traffic is increasing. This creates metropolitan regions that are characterised by numerous functional economic, cultural, and societal interactions and dependencies between core cities, adjacent settlements, and the wider surrounding area. Today the transport sector is responsible for around a quarter of total energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the ASEAN region.

The importance of climate-sensitive integrated planning has been recognised by the Kuala Lumpur Transport Strategic Plan 2016-2025 and the ASEAN Regional Strategy on Sustainable Land Transport. However, the challenges of metropolitan regions have not yet been explicitly addressed in existing strategies. Local decision-makers’ understanding of sustainable mobility approaches needs to be enhanced, and models for cooperation across boundaries and government agencies need to be developed further.

The Sustainable Mobility in Metropolitan Regions (SMMR) project, now in its second phase (SMMR II) since November 2021, aims to overcome these challenges.

Objective

Local, national and international transport policymakers, experts, operators and other relevant actors in ASEAN’s Member States are developing strategies to overcome the mobility challenges facing large urban conglomerations in the region.

Approach

The project applies the Avoid–Shift –Improve approach, which was issued in 2021, by the ASEAN Transport Ministers Meeting. Essentially the project is active in four areas:

• Facilitating the set-up of cross-border working groups linking cities, neighbouring municipalities, provinces and national authorities to promote the conclusion of cooperation agreements to improve urban transport;
• Supporting of knowledge building and the exchange of experience via regional conferences, workshops, training courses and seminars as well as through publishing of knowledge resources and dissemination using existing platforms;
• Contributing to implementation of the Kuala Lumpur Transport Strategic Plan (KLTSP) in cooperation with the ASEAN Land Transport Working Group and the ASEAN Secretariat, through the elaboration of policy recommendations relevant for sustainable urban mobility planning to enhance the implementation of the Avoid-Shift-Improve approach in the urban transport sector.

Last Update: May 2023