UITP at TRA 2026 - Research, Innovation and Dialogue in Budapest
Transport Research Arena’s 2026 edition, this time in Budapest, brought together mobility professionals, researchers and academics from across Europe and the world for four days of sessions, discussions and demonstrations spanning road safety, urban equity, zero-emission transport, vehicle automation, the future of international cooperation in mobility research and more!
Taking place from 18 to 21 May, UITP and several of its partner projects were featured front and centre, advancing the sector on key themes and addressing salient issues head-on. During this pivotal week, UITP moderated strategic sessions, coordinated project clusters, co-hosted panels, ran live vehicle demonstrations, and represented the sector at the highest levels of European policy dialogue. Over the course of the week, 15 colleagues attended, 12 third-party-funded projects were represented and disseminated, 6 presentations were organised at the UITP stand, and UITP moderated, coordinated, or spoke at 11 sessions across the full conference programme.
UITP once again left its mark on the TRA, notably, being recognised publicly by Hungary’s new Minister of Transport, Dávid Vitézy, who gave praise to UITP and its training programmes. Beyond the sessions and the stand, the conference’s poster presentations also offered a further opportunity to engage with cutting-edge academic research.
UITP from kick-off to the final whistle
UITP’s engagement began even before the first session. Umberto Guida, Head of Projects Strategy at UITP, represented the organisation at the opening ceremony, where UITP was proud to sponsor the first prize of the Young Researchers Awards (TRA VISION) in the category of cross-modal passengers. The award recognises the next generation of talent shaping the future of mobility, and UITP’s sponsorship reflects a long-standing commitment to investing in the researchers who will carry this work forward. Supporting emerging talent is not incidental to UITP’s mission. It is part of how the sector renews itself, and how ideas debated at events like TRA eventually become the services passengers around the world, use every day.
Setting the Agenda on Road Safety
UITP opened the substantive programme on by moderating a strategic session on deploying safety measures across road transport systems, one of the conference’s core policy tracks. Karine Sbirrazzuoli, Director of Knowledge and Innovation at UITP, moderated the discussion, drawing together perspectives from academia, industry, and European policymakers, including representatives of the European Commission. Despite meaningful progress in recent decades, road fatalities remain far too high, and the session examined how the Safe System Approach can be deployed more effectively, addressing systemic barriers such as funding gaps, political will, and public acceptance along the way. On the role of AI, the session landed on a clear consensus: quality data must be the foundation of any meaningful advance.
Activities at the UITP Stand
Throughout the course of the week, the UITP stand served as a hub for UITP members, partners in our projects, and EU representatives. A multitude of sessions at the UITP stand illustrate this.
The NEXUS project, for instance, prior to its engaging external advisory board workshop on 21 May, presented its achievements live at the stand, showcasing demand management and simulation tools alongside a new vehicle concept for urban metro systems. R2DATO was represented through a video and a presentation on digital and automated train control, extending the stand’s reach into railway innovation. Throughout all five days, the stand served as a place to discover the UITP Summit in Hamburg in 2027, a major upcoming milestone for the global public transport community.
User accessibility at the centre of the conversation
One of the most important discussions which took place at the UITP stand was on the concept of “Mobility as a Right (MaaR)”. With respect to this discussion, UITP brought together UPPER, GOLIA and the eBRT2030 projects.
The session asked a deceptively practical question: how do you measure whether a transport system is fair? UPPER’s participatory approach, grounded in the Thessaloniki mobility plan and microsimulation analysis, illustrated how user-centred research translates into policy. GOLIA highlighted a persistent systemic problem: planning still too often relies on fragmented, outdated data, undermining the eight dimensions of mobility as a right. eBRT2030 made the case for electric Bus Rapid Transit as an equity tool, delivering metro-level service at bus-level cost, with indicators spanning greenhouse gas reduction, affordability, physical accessibility, and passenger satisfaction.
Sustainable Mobility Innovations in a variety of environments, including ports
Another landmark session, entitled “Identifying Specific User Needs” took the conversation a step further, with GOLIA, PIONEERS, ULTIMO, and Interreg’s NEXT-RIDE examining the gap between what designers assume users want and what users need. The session put on display the collaboration between ULTIMO and NEXT-RIDE, with the accessibility of automated vehicles being central to their successful implementation. During her intervention on behalf of ULTIMO, Bettina Bouëte, Junior Project Manager at UITP, stressed that “AVs aren’t just technology. It is essential to include users, including those with impairments, from the beginning of the design process to build the relevant service.” Prof. Varga from the EMARC underlined the same point, highlighting the importance of coordination among stakeholders to translate user requirements into appropriate use cases.
The PIONEERS project, now entering its final months, was showcased at the UITP stand. Although the project focuses on ports, it highlights a broader mobility challenge: ports are major economic hubs and key nodes in urban transport networks, yet they are rarely included in mobility planning discussions. Carmela Canonico from UITP, Inge de Wolf from the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, and Max Zañartu from the Port of Barcelona discussed how ports can support more sustainable mobility, from helping cruise passengers choose public transport or on-demand shuttles to reach the city centre, to encouraging greener commuting options for port employees. Initiatives such as Smart Ways to Antwerp illustrate how ports can play an active role in reducing transport-related emissions by promoting public transport, cycling, walking, and other low-carbon choices.
UITP also moderated a strategic session on zero-emission mobility in urban areas, bringing together perspectives on how cities can accelerate the transition to cleaner transport, another signal of the trust placed in UITP to chair conversations where the stakes are high.
Reaching Users all over the World
Although the focus of TRA is certainly on European funded projects, externalizing their results and best practices is vital to advancing better public transport practices throughout Europe, in a similar fashion, having the international perspective present in European funded projects can help projects think outside the box, and approach issues from diverse perspectives.
This matter was addressed at a special session at the UITP stand where ULTIMO joined eBRT2030, TRANS-SAFE, UPPER, and COOL4 projects to address this directly, drawing on the experiences of projects that have navigated the friction of different policy environments, funding structures, and planning cultures abroad.
The collaboration between ULTIMO and COOL4 was particularly illustrative in this regard. Through peer-to-peer exchanges on regulation and use cases for public transport, the two projects explored how to manage the transition toward scaling automated mobility, with a focus on meeting genuine mobility needs while maintaining service quality for both users and drivers across the entire travel chain.
Flavio Grazian, Project Manager at UITP also represented the eBRT2030 project at Special Session 26, “One system, many actors”, which explored how EU-funded mobility innovation can scale beyond Europe under the TRA 2026 theme of ReGeneration in Transport. The session brought together lessons from flagship projects, examined partnerships between Horizon Europe funding and external cooperation instruments, and began mapping a shared scaling roadmap toward 2030 covering e-mobility, systemic transformation, and electric BRT.
As Flavio put it: “When we talk about international cooperation, we need to see also the long term. Capacity building is something at the core of the eBRT2030 project, with a Twinning programme involving five cities from Latin America, Africa and Asia and three small international demonstrations.”
Automation on the Ground
The ULTIMO project had one of the most visible events at the TRA, with the operation of live runs of the EVO3 automated shuttle provided by Navya Mobility. This demonstration of the driverless shuttle was run across four stops on the TRA grounds, taking passengers at their leisure throughout the premises. This, for many users, was their first chance to experience true autonomous transport, whose advancement in Europe is central to the ULTIMO project’s objectives.
Next stops: Hamburg, Milan
Thank you to all those who attended events hosted by UITP, and those who saw interventions delivered by UITP staff, and members. TRA is a valuable event from UITP’s perspective, because the challenges that are addressing mobility, are both multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, each project confronts some of these challenges and offers its own perspectives, however true sustained cooperation like TRA, helps the sector develop a more holistic approach to addressing the future of mobility.
We look forward to continuing this work and to welcoming the global public transport community to the UITP Summit in Hamburg, 24 to 27 June 2027, where many of these projects will be showcased as well! The next edition of the TRA will take place in Milan in 2028; we are already greatly looking forward.
