Select measure packages with stakeholders
Step 7 of 12 Measure Planning
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
For a full method on choosing measures and integrating them into packages, the European project CH4LLENGE set out how a city can build its own road map and provided a manual 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.