UITP at CIVITAS Forum 2026
Thessaloniki, home to the Greece’s newest automated and driverless metro, hosted the CIVITAS Forum from 15 to 17 September 2026.
Under the theme “Roots and Routes: Moving Forward to Competitive, Connected and Resilient Urban Mobility”, the Forum brought together city leaders, policymakers, researchers, mobility experts and the wider transport community for three days focused on clean, smart, inclusive and sustainable urban mobility across Europe.
Colleagues from across the association joined UITP President Gautier Brodeo in representing Europe’s public transport sector and urging policymakers to recognise urban, suburban and regional public transport as a strategic sector, essential to the European Commission’s competitiveness agenda.
The importance of the sector should be reflected in investment decisions and funding frameworks. For this reason, the next EU budget is crucial to ensure predictable funding, essential for infrastructure, fleets, depots, multimodal hubs, digitalisation, accessibility, and resilience.
Strong local mobility also strengthens Europe’s wider transport system: every long-distance and cross-border journey ultimately begins and ends locally.
Resilience starts before disruption
Resilience was one of the Forum’s main threads, alongside competitiveness and connectivity. UITP President Gautier Brodeo joined Marcel Rommerts (European Commission), Francesco Rosella (THEMA S.A.), Ruslan Martsinkiv (Ivano-Frankivsk City Council) and Marta Serrano Balbuena (Renfe) to discuss how transport systems can prepare for, respond to and recover from climate events, energy disruptions, cyber incidents and other unexpected pressures.
The discussion looked at resilience from three angles: the system itself (infrastructure, vehicles, devices); the people (staff and passengers); and the procedures needed when something goes wrong, from emergency planning to evacuation.
For public transport, preparedness cannot begin once a crisis has already happened. Networks need to be planned, financed, operated, and maintained with disruption in mind from the outset, because people still need to reach work, healthcare, and education when normal conditions break down.
The panel pointed to the 2024 Paris Olympics as an example. Facing an exceptional demand peak, authorities and operators prepared years in advance through coordinated planning, dedicated procedures, readiness exercises, real-time monitoring, so the network could absorb the pressure without losing reliability.
That kind of preparation takes sustained investment and close cooperation between authorities and operators, which is why the President reframed the question:
Early adaptation avoids far greater costs later, such as emergency repairs, prolonged disruption, and the toll on passengers and cities.
Public transport is easy to take for granted, until it stops. That’s the premise behind UITP’s session at the European Week of Regions, taking place 12 October. In the year of the first World Public Transport Day, and with a focus on social inclusion and territorial cohesion, the session will explore what would happen if metro, bus and tram services in a European city are suspended for 24 hours.
Participants will take on the perspective of local authorities, employers, healthcare providers, commuters and transport operators, to assess the impact on daily life and regional functioning. The discussion will be enriched by real-life examples and case studies from UITP members.
Planning public transport around people and data
A resilient public transport system still has to work for people day to day. At CIVITAS, that meant looking at how services are planned, how passengers are involved and what cities need to know before making decisions.
UPPER, coordinated by UITP, featured across several CIVITAS sessions, with cities and partners sharing experience from work already underway.
In the session on inclusive and accessible public transport, a new tram for Mannheim, Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen showed how quickly accessibility can get complicated. The vehicle had to work within a network shaped by historic bridges and narrow tracks, while meeting modern technical requirements and accommodating a wide range of passenger needs in limited space.
Passengers were brought in early, testing a full-scale mock-up and suggesting changes before the design was finalised, a process that also surfaced real trade-offs, since more space for one need can mean less for another, and some limits are simply set by the infrastructure. One of the learnings was that accessibility cannot be checked at the end. Passengers need to be involved while there’s still something to change and address.
That same principle of knowing who you’re planning for runs through an updated European reference on public transport within Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, due in 2027.
Travel patterns have shifted, new mobility services have emerged, and there’s growing recognition that public transport has not served every passenger or journey equally well: carers, older people, people with disabilities, and those in suburban or rural areas often have very different needs.
It also means planning beyond municipal borders, since passengers cross them daily and networks need to follow how people actually move.
The guidance will help cities understand demand, coordinate across authorities, plan investment and manage change as new infrastructure, services and technology are introduced.
Good planning also depends on knowing who’s travelling, who isn’t, and why
In the session on turning data into decisions, Rome, one of the UPPER cities, showed how accident and mobility data is informing its 30 km/h approach. The evidence behind the measure shows why speed matters: lower speeds reduce the risk of collisions becoming fatal. Here, data is not simply describing what is happening on the streets; it is helping the city decide how to act.
UITP also contributed through GOLIA, an EU-funded project tackling a related challenge: having a lot of mobility data does not automatically mean having the information needed to make an efficient decision.
Passenger numbers, traffic counts and journey times show what is happening, but not always why. Lower public transport use in one neighbourhood might come down to cost, reliability, accessibility, safety or a journey with too many changes, and the answer is often scattered across different operators, municipalities and departments covering health, environment and land use.
GOLIA is working to connect those pieces, starting from the decision that needs to be made, then identifying what information already exists, what is missing, and who needs to work together to act on it.
Once services are running, data has another job. UPPER’s U-SIM.live helps operators monitor public transport in real time, manage disruptions and test possible responses, and was recognised at CIVITAS for its level of market readiness.
UPPER and GOLIA also had stands in the exhibition, alongside eBRT2030, where many of these exchanges continued beyond the sessions.
No single tool, dataset or measure builds better public transport on its own. But the examples from CIVITAS pointed the same way: listen to passengers, understand how people actually move, and give cities the information they need to make better decisions.
Next stop: the UITP Summit in Hamburg
For UITP, the Forum was another opportunity to connect with the wider urban mobility community, meet with our members on the ground, and exchange with EU officials and fellow European associations on the issues public transport faces every day, from resilience and accessibility to planning and data.
Next year, the UITP Summit 2027 brings the public transport community together again, with new ideas, new solutions, and more to learn from what cities, operators and the sector are doing next.
See you in Hamburg!
