Select measure packages with stakeholders

Step 7 of 12 Measure Planning

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With a vision agreed and targets in place, the plan turns from intent to action. In the urban outskirts that turn is narrow. A single intervention rarely shifts a periphery built around the car, and the budget to attempt several at once is seldom there, so the few measures you select have to be the ones that work together. This step is about picking that handful and picking it with the people who will fund and run it.

Five families to choose from

Across its living labs DREAMS works with five families of intervention for the outskirts. They are the shared vocabulary for everything that follows, and most plans will draw on more than one.

Mobility hubs

A physical point that gathers shared modes and links them to public transport, often with the small services and greenery that make a place work. It can also anchor a wider street refurbishment.

Flexible activity hubs

Pop-up or shared premises that bring shops and services to places too thin for a permanent outlet, from a corner shop widening its offer to a mobile market. They shorten trips by moving the destination closer rather than the resident further.

Demand-responsive transport

Flexible public transport for sparse areas, giving denser stops and wider coverage for the same outlay. In the outskirts a hybrid or semi-flexible scheme tends to fit best, and it is judged on the access it opens up rather than on fare recovery.

Car-sharing and car-pooling

Access to a car for the occasional journey proximity cannot cover, so a household can manage without owning one. An accompanying measure that supports a car-light life, not a way to deliver the neighbourhood on its own.

Shared micromobility

Bikes, e-bikes and scooters for the short trips a car too often makes. Lightweight and close to the heart of the 15-minute idea, and strongest where stations are dense enough to be relied on.

Before you choose, you should already have

The targets and indicators agreed for each objective, with the impact area each one falls under, so every candidate measure can be judged against the same standard.

A first read on what your area can fund and on who could realistically operate a new service in it, since a package no organisation can run is a shortlist, not a plan.

A look at what comparable outskirts have already tried across the six living labs, so the shortlist starts from evidence rather than from a blank page.

Bundle, do not pick one

The case for packaging is straightforward. In the outskirts the proximity gap is rarely caused by one thing. It is partly that everyday destinations sit too far apart and partly that the ways of reaching them are thin, so a measure that mends only one side leaves residents little better off. A package that pairs a mode with a destination, a bike-share feeding a new mobility hub beside a relocated grocery or a pop-up activity hub, closes more of the gap than either move could alone. Start from the scenario your coalition preferred and turn it into a concrete bundle of this kind.

Your accessibility picture lets a team test these combinations before committing, reading how much of the perceived gap each package closes and for which groups, so the choice rests on evidence rather than enthusiasm. Weigh each candidate against the impact areas you adopted as targets, and aim for genuine choice rather than bare coverage, two or three groceries within reach instead of a single one.

A single measure

One intervention standing alone. A new bike-share with nowhere new to ride to, or a relocated shop still beyond a safe walk. Easy to fund and to announce, but it moves one lever while the periphery has several.

A coherent package

Two or three measures chosen to reinforce one another, typically a mode paired with a destination. Harder to assemble and to finance, but it is the combination that actually closes the gap, and the one a coalition can rally behind.

Two labs, two mixes

The same goal, less dependence on the car, led two DREAMS labs to very different family mixes once local needs were weighed.

Brussels, Haren and Neder-Over-Heembeek

The Brussels lab built its package around the journeys a 15-minute neighbourhood cannot absorb, the hospital trip or the bulky shop. It leaned on car-sharing and car-pooling and on volunteer-run demand-responsive transport for less mobile residents, with cargo-bike sharing for lighter loads, so that a household could give up a car it needed only occasionally.

Budapest, Rákosmente

Rákosmente went the other way and put shared micromobility at the centre. A public bike-share laid out as an island network, separate from the dense inner-city service, set out to replace the short car trips that proximity ought to make unnecessary, with new stations treated as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

Neither mix is the right answer in the abstract. Each is right for its own area, which is the whole point of selecting against local evidence rather than importing a measure because it worked somewhere else.

Decide now how you will judge it

Choosing a measure and deciding how you will judge it are one task rather than two. Germany's national mobility-planning guidance presents this step as selecting and evaluating measures with stakeholders together, and asks planners to plan the monitoring and evaluation of every measure from the outset rather than after delivery (see Germany's national SUMP platform (BMV)). So for each measure in the package, settle at the moment of selection the few indicators that will track it, taken from the targets you have already agreed, and decide in the same breath how and how often the data will be gathered and how each figure will be worked out from it. Naming who is responsible for that monitoring now, ideally a team with some independence from the delivery, is what keeps the later evidence credible.

Leave room to be wrong as well. Regular checking is there to show whether the intended improvement is arriving on the expected timescale, and equally to catch the effects no one planned for, so a measure can be adjusted rather than left to run. These decisions are picked up again when the plan is re-measured during monitoring, far easier when each measure already carries its own yardstick than when that yardstick has to be reconstructed afterwards.

Select with the coalition, not for it

A package chosen behind closed doors and then unveiled is a package few outside the room will defend. Put the shortlisted options, each with the gap it closes attached, in front of the cross-boundary coalition you built at the outset while the decision is still genuinely open. The organisations that helped weigh a package are the ones that will commit to delivering it, which is what the next step turns into an accountable programme.

Go deeper

For a full method on choosing measures and integrating them into packages, the EU project CH4LLENGE set out how a city can build its own road map and provided a measure selection kit to go from theory into practice. To scout providers and procurement models for the five families, the EIT Urban Mobility marketplace gathers operators and tested solutions from cities across Europe.

Sources and further information

EU SUMP Guidelines, Second Edition (Rupprecht Consult, 2019), Step 7, Select measure packages with stakeholders.

DREAMS Deliverable 2.2: governance and business frameworks for the five intervention families in the urban outskirts.

DREAMS Deliverable 3.1: the accessibility modelling framework, used to test how single measures and combinations close the perceived gap.

DREAMS Deliverable 5.1: set-up of the living labs, including the Brussels and Budapest interventions.

DREAMS Deliverable 6.1: the six impact areas a package is judged against.

Maßnahmen vereinbaren, German national SUMP portal, Bundesministerium für Verkehr.

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SUMP overview

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