Daniel Kaszubowski

Across Europe, cities are redefining the function of streets in city centers, transforming them from spaces primarily serving car traffic into vibrant, liveable public spaces. These transformations reflect a broader shift toward sustainable urban development, aimed at fostering local communities, enhancing walkability, and reducing the environmental impact of transport. Gdynia’s Starowiejska Street—one of the key service-oriented streets in the port city center—underwent a redesign in 2023 that prioritized pedestrians, local services, and social interaction. This article examines customers’ transport preferences when visiting retail and service establishments along Starowiejska Street, analyzing differences by business type and the perceived role of parking availability. The study draws on a field survey conducted in May 2025 among 588 users of the street, complemented by inferential testing, binary logistic regression, correspondence analysis, and k-means cluster analysis, providing both descriptive and multivariate evidence on customer mobility patterns in a shared street environment. The results confirm that the street functions primarily as a local, pedestrian- and public transport-oriented destination, with walking (46.6%) and public transport (28.2%) dominating access modes. Statistically significant associations between travel mode, visit frequency, and business type were established through chi-square testing. Cluster analysis identified three distinct customer mobility profiles—Local Regulars, Occasional Visitors, and Car-Oriented Visitors—reflecting differentiated accessibility needs across the street’s commercial mix. Because the survey was conducted on a single day in 2025, two years after the redesign and without a pre-redesign baseline or a comparison street, the study describes the current, post-redesign accessibility pattern rather than demonstrating a change caused by the redesign. Within this scope, the case of Starowiejska Street illustrates how the organization of access to local services and public space is associated with everyday mobility choices in a way that appears compatible with environmental and economic sustainability goals. The redesign also illustrates, descriptively, how a more inclusive, pedestrian-oriented built environment can broaden accessibility for diverse user groups—including older residents, caregivers, and people with mobility limitations—whose needs are central to universal design thinking. The study contributes to the growing body of research on sustainable urban mobility by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between accessibility, street design, and local commerce in a single European port-city case. The research was supported by Gdynia Maritime University and conducted within the framework of the EU Horizon project SPINE—Smart Public Transport Initiative for Climate-Neutral Cities in Europe—situating the findings within a broader European context of mobility transition.

Over the last few decades, the urban transport planning framework has changed significantly towards sustainable mobility planning. It brings new requirements for the education of transport experts. In the paper, we discuss the future of academic education concerning these changes based on case studies of two prestigious technical faculties in Germany and Poland and a social science faculty in Czechia offering study programmes related to sustainable urban mobility planning. We applied a self-assessment questionnaire to investigate how the study programmes prepare future mobility managers and present the concept of sustainable mobility to students. Our results show that the existing study programmes do not cover all steps of sustainable urban mobility plan development. We identified a few gaps common to the technical and social science faculties, such as consensus-seeking knowledge and methods, monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches, and the development of soft skills (presentation and communication skills and stakeholder involvement techniques).

The article presents a method which helps local authorities to evaluate urban freight transport models. Given the complex requirements for input data and the inability to supply them for most cities, a proper quantitative evaluation of model functionality may be quite difficult for local authorities. Freight transport models designed to support sustainable urban freight transport objectives are a particular example. To overcome these difficulties, the structure of the method is based on a qualitative analysis of strategic and operational conditions of urban freight management for modelling purposes. A consistent set of criteria is developed to help with parameterising strategic objectives and the analytical requirements of tools to achieve those objectives. The problems of data availability and capture are also included. The method consists of three tiers that are arranged hierarchically to reflect the interrelations. The proposed method was verified against Gdynia’s (Poland) urban freight management requirements. The city was chosen for its early experience of urban freight studies and improvement measures and because it has already defined its strategic objectives. Two comprehensive freight transport models (Freturb and Wiver) and existing city’s transport model were evaluated. The results have ruled out the existing transport model rendering it ineffective as a tool to support urban freight management to meet the city’s strategic objectives. While Freturb turned out to be much better suited for the needs, dedicated models still face a basic barrier of cities having to redesign their systems for collecting urban transport data.

Sustainable urban freight management is a growing challenge for local authorities due to social pressures and increasingly more stringent environmental protection requirements. Freight and its adverse impacts, which include emissions and noise, considerably influence the urban environment. This calls for a reliable assessment of what can be done to improve urban freight and meet stakeholders’ requirements. While changes in a transport system can be simulated using models, urban freight models are quite rare compared to the tools available for analysing private and public transport. Therefore, this article looks at ways to extend Gdynia’s existing mesoscopic transport model by adding data from delivery surveys and examines the city’s capacity for reducing CO₂ emissions through the designation of dedicated delivery places. The results suggest that extending the existing model by including freight-specific data can be justified when basic regulatory measures are to be used to improve freight transport. There are, however, serious limitations when an exact representation of the urban supply chain structure is needed, an element which is required for modelling advanced measures.