2019 Annual Polis Conference

The Polis Annual Conference provides an opportunity for cities and regions to showcase their transport achievements to a large audience of mobility experts, practitioners and decision makers.

It is also an opportunity for the wider transport community to engage with representatives of city and regional authorities on innovative transport solutions. The Polis Conference 2019 brought together over 600 participants in Brussels on 27-28 November. The Polis Conference 2020 will take place in Arnhem-Nijmegen City Region, Netherlands, on 2-3 December 2020.

Presentations

All the presentations from the Polis Conference 2019 are available here.

Conference photos

The photos of the conference are available here.

Programme

View the conference programme here.

FAST FORWARD. Bloom or gloom?

In the conference’s opening plenary session, we discussed two major trends that seem to be shaping the urban mobility ecosystem of tomorrow. The human city is giving streets back to the people and embraces active travel. The tech city is exploring technological transport innovation to the fullest and embraces the disruptions coming our way. We asked ourselves: How will these two trends converge? Is there bright light ahead of us?

David Zipper, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, gave a keynote speech. The session included a panel debate with Lot van Hooijdonk (Utrecht Deputy Mayor), Miguel Gaspar (Lisbon Deputy Mayor), Philippe Crist (International Transport Forum at the OECD), Caroline Hazelhurst (Bird) and Daniel Deparis (Daimler).

Who is the action hero in vision zero?

The conference’s closing plenary session, “Who’s the action hero in vision zero?”, was an opportunity to reflect on the fundamental issue of road safety. Local authorities, organisations and mobility operators officially signed The New Paradigm for Safe City Street, a city declaration launched by Polis and EUROCITIES.

The session featured a keynote speech by Jeannot Mersch, President of the European Federation of Road Traffic Victims, and a panel debate with Matthew Baldwin (European Road Safety Coordinator at the European Commission), Lili Matson (London Chief Officer for Safety, Health and Environment), Suzanne Anderson (City of Gothenburg) and Eric de Kievit (SWOV).