Plan National de Mobilité 2035

From 2011 to 2021, Luxembourg’s population increased by 25% and jobs by 32%. 2018’s national mobility strategy Modu 2.0 showed that, with such growth, the old approach of racing to alleviate bottlenecks, and doing so separately for each transport mode, had no chance of ever catching up with demand.

PNM 2035 implements three paradigm shifts:

1. Focus on moving people, not vehicles
2. Plan for the mobility demand that will be there when the projects are finished, not for the bottlenecks that are in place when planning starts
3. And to do all this in a truly multi-modal way.

The plan outlines more than 200 projects, including major railway upgrades, a tramway network, and high performance corridors for buses and highways turned into multi-modal corridors.

While some of its projects are spectacular on their own, the most innovative features concern the way PNM 2035 was conceived:

1. Since almost half of all employees in Luxembourg commute from France, Germany, and Belgium, the planning process, (starting with the household survey), covered the entire national territory, plus the border regions of three neighbouring countries.
2. Coordinated by the Ministry, the plan was elaborated in a truly multi-modal way thanks to the deep involvement of the railway and tram companies, ATP’s national bus service and the roadworks administration.
3. The most profound outcome is the “functional classification” of the road network, whereby each road is assigned a multi-modal role that serves the whole concept.

PNM 2035 was remarkably well received, not just across the political spectrum, the population and the press, but, almost more importantly, by the planners working for the different transport modes.

Having a coherent and credible plan, that they all contributed to and that allows them to focus their projects on, appears to have provided them with a “light at the end of the tunnel”. Major infrastructure projects across all modes have been substantially modified and improved. Where pieces in the multi-modal puzzle were missing, significant new projects and transport offers were defined.