[REPORT]

The European Commission greenlights the
e-SUM Project

The European Commission has granted its financial backing to eSum, a project focussing on PTW safety in cities. The project is lead by the city of Barcelona and involves ACEM, PTW manufacturers as well as three major European capitals.

ESUM is a collaborative initiative between industry and local authorities of Europe’s principal motorcycle cities aiming at identifying, developing and adopting measures designed to deliver safer motorcycling in the city environment. Advances in state-of-the-art will be demonstrated in four cities (Barcelona, Paris, London and Rome). Once completed, the results of the eSUM work will be made available in a EU-wide database.

Two-thirds of all accidents occur on roads in urban areas, where 80% of European citizens live; the contribution of active, focused urban authorities is thus crucial to the successful realisation of EU road safety policy.

PTW contribution to mobility is higher in cities than elsewhere. Faced with traffic problems and difficulty in finding parkings, users increasingly opt for PTWs to answer their mobility needs. On their part, city authorities face the need to curb congestion and emissions, while they also have to come up with sustainable transport plans for the future. The aim of eSUM is to demonstrate that a constant reduction in PTW accidents is feasible by addressing PTW safety through an integrated approach. In the context of a shared responsibility strategy ACEM manufacturers support and actively participate together with city authorities to improve the diagnosis of the urban PTW problems.

Within the eSUM framework a diagnosis will be made on collision prevention, accident avoidance and mitigation of accident severity. The analysis of the gathered data will allow to identify guidelines which will be transferred to other cities.

ESUM will start by performing urban Road Safety benchmarking and accident analyses to identify safer PTW models and features. It will then seek to identify features for safer vehicles, best practices for targeted enforcement and appropriately designed infrastructure, as well as ways of improving driving and riding behaviour.

The project will stimulate the adoption by cites of urban Motorcycling Action Plans with dedicated traffic management policies and strategies.

ESUM best practices will be transferred to cities across Europe (national programmes and follower cities, city networks, P2W’s national industry manufacturers’ associations, EU projects, published materials aimed at the scientific community) and to citizens (communication campaigns).

Besides Barcelona city authority and ACEM part of eSUM are Transport for London, the Mobility Agency for the city of Rome (ATAC), Marie de Paris, BMW Motorrad, Piaggio, Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT), Altran DSD, University of Florence, and Athens medical school.