Air quality in European cities is still a challenge, with various urban areas frequently exceeding the PM2.5 and NO2 concentration levels allowed by the European Union Air Quality Standards. This is a problem both in terms of legislation compliance, but also in terms of health of citizens, as it has been recently estimated that 400 to 450 thousand people die prematurely every year due to poor air quality. Air quality in cities can be improved with a number of interventions, at different sectoral (industry, traffic, residential, etc …) and geographical (international, European, national, local, etc.) levels. In this paper we explore the potential of city level plans to improve mobility and air quality (excluding electro-mobility options, not considered in this study). We applied the "Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans" (SUMPs) framework to 642 cities in Europe and modelled how the measures they include may impact at first on mobility and emissions at urban level, and then on urban background concentrations of PM2.5 and NO2. Results show that annual averages moderately improve for both pollutants, with reductions of urban background concentrations up to 2% for PM2.5 and close to 4% for NO2. The impact on NO2 at street level (that will be higher than on urban background) is not evaluated in this work. The air quality improvement of the simulated SUMP would only partially alleviate air quality problems in urban areas, but such a reduction in the emissions of air pollutants should still be considered as a positive result of SUMPs, given that they correspond to a set of low-cost measures that can be implemented at local level. Furthermore, the introduction of electro-mobility options (not considered here) would increase the impact on air quality. Other types of benefits, such as reduced fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, higher impact at street level or accident rates reduction further add to the overall positive impact.

Air travel has a decisive role in the spread of infectious diseases at the global level. We present a methodology applied during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that uses detailed aviation data at the final destination level in order to measure the risk of the disease spreading outside China. The approach proved to be successful in terms of identifying countries with a high risk of infected travellers and as a tool to monitor the evolution of the pandemic in different countries. The high number of undetected or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, however, limits the capacity of the approach to model the full dynamics. As a result, the risk for countries with a low number of passengers from Hubei province appeared as low. Globalization and international aviation connectivity allow travel times that are much shorter than the incubation period of infectious diseases, a fact that raises the question of how to react in a potential new pandemic.

The EU-wide survey presented here was carried out in 2014 with the objective of gathering in order a number of transport and mobility indicators on transport user preferences at both urban and long-distance level in a uniform way, with emphasis on the potential of emerging transport technologies and the acceptability of various transport policy measures.The CAWI (Computer Aided Web Interview) survey covered all 28 Member States of the European Union with the same questionnaire translated in the local languages. Samples of 1000 individuals in each country reflected the composition of adult population (from 16 years on) in terms of gender, age class, employment status, education level and living region.The survey provided a rich and comparable picture of mobility across the 28 EU countries; many similarities across countries were found together with some differences. In a way, the findings suggest that, despite some national peculiarities, mobility habits and behaviour are relatively homogenous in Europe and are determined especially by socio-economic drivers.The result of the survey confirmed that passenger mobility in EU is heavily centred on personal car, which is the most used transport mode also for long distance trips. Relatively higher modal share in East European countries appears to be driven mainly by the lower car availability rather than higher quality of public transport services.Europeans’ trips are essentially local, even though there is a share of citizens travelling frequently over longer distances. In particular, individuals with highly qualified jobs travel significantly more than others above 1000km not only for business but also for leisure.According to the survey results, the attitude towards electric vehicles is rather positive: one third of EU citizens declared to be willing to consider purchasing a battery or hybrid car in the next future. The picture for car sharing is more blurred: only a minority is interested in this service and, interestingly, half of those interested do not see this service as an actual alternative to car ownership. Opinions in relation to policy issues such as the measures for the internalization of environmental effects of transport are quite differentiated but in general regulatory restrictions seem to be more acceptable than pricing measures

This paper explores the factors affecting the uptake of hybrid and electric vehicles in the European Union (EU) using data from two extensive cross-sectional surveys. Each survey consists of 26,500 responses to a questionnaire that combines socio-economic and behavioral aspects. The share of respondents across the EU stating that they would certainly or probably consider purchasing a hybrid or a battery-powered electric vehicle (H&EV) in the near future rose from 32% in 2014 to 37.4% in 2018. There is, however, a high variability among EU member states, as well as across different socio-economic groups. Propensity is highly correlated with income, educational attainment, and urbanization level. In order to address the high degree of collinearity, we applied a machine learning classification model to analyze and explain the interaction between the variables that affected the expressed propensity to purchase such a vehicle. The findings highlight something largely missing from the literature, namely that local conditions and regional variation are a major, if not decisive, factor regarding purchasing choices. Seen from a policy perspective, this conclusion may provide guidance regarding how to support the take up of H&EVs through measures that are tailored to the specific needs at the local level.