Salt mines, a significant category of local, regional, national, and/or European underground heritage, are becoming attractive tourism destinations. This paper examines three cases of salt mining in different European countries, namely Wieliczka in Poland, Campina de Cima in Portugal, and Turda in Romania. They are analyzed in the context of history, typical attributes of their attractiveness, and new uses after the salt extraction was or is going to be stopped, in order to detect their unique values as important assets for both Underground Built Heritage (UBH) and Salt Heritage Tourism (SHT). The results of their comparison show that despite a positive impact related to their protection as cultural and industrial heritage, there are also some negative aspects related to increasing costs of their maintenance and adaptation of salt mines to new functions and to meet the tourism needs. By putting in place measures to enhance the awareness of their values and for activating the local community, the three mines are showcases for the economic outputs for their sites and regions, as well as for increasing knowledge regarding UBH.

Urban mobility is a critical aspect of sustainable urban development, with significant environmental, social, and economic implications. Assessing the sustainability of urban mobility systems in order to create more carbon neutral, liveable, healthier, and sustainable cities and neighborhoods for the future requires a multidimensional approach that integrates diverse factors. However, the lack of a unified assessment framework poses challenges in comparing and evaluating different urban mobility projects. This article proposes an ontology for assessing the sustainability of urban mobility systems. This ontology is based on a multidimensional approach that integrates knowledge from experts in transportation engineering, urban planning, environmental science, and social sciences to incorporate existing sustainability indicators and frameworks, as well as domain-specific knowledge. A consensus approach based on Dempster–Shäfer (DS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods is proposed to account for uncertainties and to allow for the consideration of preferences and ill judgment. Through a case study in Romania, the authors demonstrated the applicability of the proposal to provide a comprehensive and flexible framework for assessing urban mobility sustainability. The proposed ontology provides a valuable tool for policymakers, urban planners, and transportation engineers to make informed decisions towards sustainable urban mobility, and the sensitivity analysis is carried out to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework. It has potential for iterative validation and feedback from domain experts, and can serve as a foundation for future research.

This paper is an initial exploratory study that provides recommendations for the sustainable development of future automated and connected transport (ACT) systems in Romania. To achieve this, our paper investigates the different factors that influence mobility behaviour related to ACT systems through two different themes. The first part analyses (i) the strategic framework that is relevant to future ACT deployment and (ii) the spatial development patterns of large cities in Romania that might influence future mobility behaviour based on ACT systems. We presumed, and the study confirmed, that there is currently a poor focus on ACT systems in strategic documents and that the current spatial patterns show some premises for unsustainable mobility behaviour based on ACT systems. The second part describes the results of our analysis on the WISE-ACT survey deployed in Romania. We explored how informed Romanian citizens are about AVs; whether they are ready to use them; and what perceptions, concerns, and attitudes might influence their mobility behaviour when using ACT systems. The present analysis mainly shows that the perceptions of Romanian citizens are widely similar to those of citizens from other countries and that, for Romania, the orientation towards unsustainable forms of individual travel is maintained in terms of the future use of AVs. The recommendations that are presented here primarily address the spatial and attitudinal factors that have been identified as prerequisites for unsustainable future mobility behaviour linked to ACT systems.