ECA: EU's "sustainable' mobility stops at the edge of cities

In the European Union's suburban areas, private cars remain the rule, not the exception, and the cost of this dependency has become explosive, representing economic losses estimated at around euro180 billion per year, according to an audit report published yesterday by the European Court of Auditors (ECA). The cited document states that although the EU has built an ambitious legislative and financial framework for sustainable mobility in recent years, real change is lagging exactly where it should have been: at local and metropolitan level.

"Many EU citizens use cars in urban areas every day, often because there are no attractive mobility alternatives. While the EU has strengthened its sustainable mobility policy, efforts at local level are essential to improve the situation. Only then can we hope for less traffic jams, cleaner air and a better quality of life,” said Carlo Alberto Manfredi Selvaggi, the Member of the Court responsible for this audit, at a press conference to present the report.

The Court's audit looked at how mobility policies for commuters are planned and implemented and found that, despite a legal obligation introduced in 2024 for 431 European urban nodes to adopt sustainable urban mobility plans, these plans often fall short of reality on the ground.

To test the concrete effectiveness of the policies, the auditors looked in detail at six large urban areas in the EU: Budapest, Katowice, Lille, Lisbon, Prague and Seville. All of these cities had sustainable urban mobility plans in place, some for several years, but almost all had the same structural problem: the planning stopped at the city's administrative borders and did not cover the entire functional urban area, i.e. the very suburbs from which the massive commuter flows originate. In five of the six cases, between 4% and 64% of daily commuter trips were simply ignored by mobility plans drawn up by local authorities. In Seville, for example, over 294,000 daily trips were excluded, and in Budapest almost 695,000, precisely from areas where private car use is highest. This disconnect between the city and its commuter area undermines the very logic of sustainable mobility, say the ECA auditors. They argue that while most of the plans reviewed include measures to improve access to public transport, active mobility or reduce emissions, they systematically avoid measures that could change travel behaviour: discouraging car use. In contrast, parking management is frequently on paper, but real access restrictions, integration of mobility with spatial planning or employer-level mobility policies are rare and fragmented. The result is predictable: for commuters in the suburbs, the car remains the fastest and most convenient transport option to work and back home.

The ECA also looked at the concrete impact of EU-funded investments. It audited 21 transport projects, from metro and tram lines to multimodal hubs and park-and-ride facilities, financed by the Cohesion Funds, the Connecting Europe Facility and the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Although almost all projects were completed as planned and formally aligned with existing mobility strategies, far fewer had a significant impact on the real needs of commuters. In half of the cases, the impact was only moderate, due to planning shortcomings, lack of coordination between authorities or a superficial assessment of real demand.

The auditors' simulations are telling: at peak times, public transport proved faster than private cars in only two of the six urban areas analysed. In the rest of the cases, the car continues to offer a clear advantage, even in heavy traffic conditions. This reality explains why billions of euros invested are failing to produce the behavioural change that European policies expect, say the ECA auditors.

In their view, the problem is compounded by a lack of monitoring. Most national and regional authorities do not systematically track the implementation of sustainable urban mobility plans, and data on the impact on emissions, travel times or modal share is missing or inconsistent. Standardised reporting of urban mobility data will only become mandatory at the end of the 2027 and until then the European Commission does not have solid tools to assess whether cities are actually delivering.

In essence, the ECA report describes a costly paradox: the European Union has recognized the huge stakes of urban mobility, linked it to climate goals and allocated tens of billions of euros for the transition, but left implementation in the hands of fragmented local structures, which avoid difficult decisions and plan mobility without taking into account the commuters who are the real problem. As long as suburban areas remain captive to the private car, and plans stop at the administrative boundaries of cities, the 180 billion euros lost annually due to congestion and the promise of climate neutrality will continue to be on opposite trajectories.