UITP Europe Forum: Policy, Innovation, and the Priorities for Public Transport
At the first-ever UITP Europe Forum, held on 24 June in Brussels, one message resonated throughout the day: Europe’s public transport ambitions will only be realised if we invest in people with the same commitment that we invest in infrastructure and innovation.
Gabrielle Costigan, CEO at Global Rail Group & Vice-Chair of the UITP Europe Division
This idea ran through sessions covering European policy and research, digitalisation, automation, workforce development, and mobility data, all highlighting the many dimensions of public transport and how they are increasingly interconnected.
Alongside these discussions, participants could explore how UITP’s involvement in Research and Innovation projects are helping bring European priorities closer to the everyday needs of public transport and shared mobility.
With discussions on the next Multiannual Financial Framework reaching a decisive stage, Serena Lancione, Chair of the UITP Europe Division, highlighted the importance of ensuring that public transport remains firmly embedded in the EU’s long-term investment agenda.
Building on this momentum, UITP President Gautier Brodeo highlighted the association’s continued work to strengthen the link between research and innovation projects and policy development, ensuring that project results increasingly feed into policy positions, reinforce advocacy, and support members in further strengthening public transport across Europe.
Investing in the People Behind Public Transport
Moderated by Sónia Páscoa, Board Member of Metropolitano de Lisboa and Vice-Chair of the UITP EU Committee, this panel discussion showed that the workforce challenge facing public transport goes far beyond a shortage of drivers.
As the sector embraces digitalisation, adapts to an ageing workforce and responds to changing employee expectations, the skills needed to operate and maintain public transport are evolving rapidly.
The sector is no longer looking solely for traditional transport professions but increasingly for maintenance engineers, technicians, data analysts and digital specialists. As Emanuele Proia, General Manager at ASSTRA, noted, public transport is becoming a high-tech industry, making investment in training, reskilling and upskilling more important than ever.
He pointed to ASSTRA’s partnership with the Italian employment agency Sviluppo Lavoro Italia as an example of how the sector is responding, combining skills mapping with paid, company-based training programmes that allow young recruits to gain practical experience while earning a salary, with many progressing directly into permanent positions.
Attracting new talent is only part of the challenge. Retaining experienced employees is equally important, highlighting that addressing workforce shortages requires much more than recruitment alone.
As Gabrielle Costigan, CEO at Global Rail Group & Vice-Chair of UITP Europe Division, emphasised, it requires creating attractive career pathways, investing in continuous learning and building modern training ecosystems that equip people with the skills needed.
Public transport does not need to reinvent the wheel. Other sectors, particularly the energy industry, have already undergone major workforce transformations driven by digitalisation, demographic change and new technologies. Their experiences offer valuable lessons that can help the public transport sector build a resilient workforce and shape the future of mobility.
From the European Commission’s perspective, Isabelle Vandoorne, Deputy Head of Unit for Innovation and Urban Mobility at DG MOVE, outlined how European initiatives can support these efforts.
Alongside communication campaigns promoting the essential role of public transport and outreach activities to encourage young people to pursue careers in mobility, she highlighted the continued work of the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee and the Ambassadors for Diversity in Transport initiative, which promotes diversity, equality and inclusion across the sector.
Looking ahead, she also pointed to the forthcoming Fair Labour Mobility Package, expected after the summer, which aims to simplify and digitalise cross-border employment while encouraging a more collaborative approach to addressing labour market challenges.
EU Institutions as catalysts for mobility innovation
With representatives from DG MOVE, DG CONNECT, DG RTD and CINEA, the range of EU support already available for public transport and shared mobility came into focus, from policy, funding instruments, research programmes, deployment tools, to ways for cities, authorities and operators to learn from each other.
But this type of support does not do the work on its own. Every instrument on offer still needs to be picked up locally, adapted to a specific network, and turned into something passengers, workers and communities can actually feel in their daily journeys.
This message also echoed in the closing remarks of Mohamed Mezghani, Secretary General of UITP. Innovation and technology, he reminded participants, are already part of public transport. What matters now is how they are used, and whether they truly serve people. As he put it, “people remain the sector’s greatest asset”, and innovation should always be shaped with them in mind.
Mobility data must be shared, understood and used with purpose
Public transport already depends on data in many ways: passenger flows, fleet performance, energy use, safety, service reliability, customer information.
Grégory Malet, CSR Director at RATP Dev, spoke about a shift underway: data used to be mainly an operational tool, but sustainability reporting, resilience, regulatory requirements and responsible procurement are turning it into a strategic asset. Collecting figures, though, is only the first step as they need to be analysed and reported in ways that help act on them.
That shift is already visible at Transport for London. Rebecca Bissell, Director of Technology Product & Operations, showed how data runs through the daily work of the network: ticketing and payment patterns help explain how customers move, asset information guides renovation priorities, and safety insights inform crowd management and police presence.
But making that work at scale is another matter. Axel Volkery, Head of Unit Innovation and Urban Mobility at DG MOVE, stressed that the issue is not necessarily a “shortage of data”, the bigger problem is fragmentation: knowing where information sits, who can access it, how it can be shared, and how to build trust between partners. The European Data Space, he noted, is meant to be the connective layer that brings these scattered points together.
And even within a single organisation, access does not guarantee use. Jens Plambeck, Director of Strategic Development at Region Stockholm’s Public Transport Administration, pointed to a gap many face: the people who understand the data are not always the ones setting priorities.
When that expertise sits too far from the choices being made, useful insights can be missed or delayed. Some cities are already closing that gap: in Oslo, Ruter is using AI as a bridge to build shared understanding between the two.
In the end, mobility data can help “unlock smarter and more sustainable cities”, but only when it is tied to a clear objective. The value isn’t in collecting more. It is in helping people plan, invest, and improve services with a shared understanding of what the evidence actually shows.
Automated mobility and the challenge of scaling up
The last session of the day explored the deployment of automated mobility in Europe and what it will take to move from pilots to large-scale services – a question the discussion framed using UITP’s recent publication “Automated Mobility: The Next Step for Public Transport ”.
Clémentine Barbier, Head of Autonomous Mobility at Keolis, brought the conversation back to first principles: automation has to be designed around citizens’ needs, including the most vulnerable users, whether that’s dense urban areas, rural routes, on-demand services or fixed lines.
Endre Angelvik, Executive Vice President Radical Innovation at Ruter, agreed: automation is not a goal in itself. It earns its place by what it adds to the wider public transport system, including its potential to reduce private car use.
So, what’s missing? Françoise Guaspare, Senior Policy Advisor at the Île-de-France Representation to the EU, the honest answer is that the public transport market for automated mobility does not really exist yet.
She underlined that Europe is still too often stuck at the experimental stage, and needs to push toward commercial service, supported by stronger collaboration between public authorities, operators and industry. At EU level, removing the cap on type approvals was raised as one concrete step that would let investment scale rather than stall.
Jonas Wigger, Head of Public Affairs at HOLON, added that use cases need to fit into a wider mobility system, with predictable frameworks for safety, liability, type approval and operations.
The potential of automated mobility is real. What’s missing is not technology; it is common demand, shared procurement, long-term investment, and frameworks harmonised enough to scale, while still leaving room for local adaptation.
A shared agenda for Europe’s public transport future
Europe’s public transport future will be built through cooperation between institutions, operators, authorities, industry, researchers, and practitioners. From workforce and mobility data to EU innovation and automated mobility, each discussion showed why the sector needs space to exchange, learn from practice and keep public transport high on Europe’s climate, investment and inclusion agendas.
The conversation doesn’t end here. It continues next, as the sector gathers at the UITP Summit in Hamburg!