ReVeAL toolkit to develop good practice UVARs

Urban Vehicle Access Regulations (UVARs) are a useful tool used widely in Europe that help the move towards people-friendly cities and help reduce transports climate impact. They include pedestrian zones, low emission zones, congestion charging, traffic limited zones, pedestrian priority zones and spatial interventions.

The EU Horizon 2020 project ReVeAL produced a toolkit to support decision makers in the process of planning and implementing UVARs. Its aim is to help cities in their path towards people centred urban spaces by giving urban road space back to people and sustainable mobility. This toolkit was developed and tested within the six ReVeAL city pilots during three and a half years of the project.  

This article outlines how other cities can use the ReVeAL toolkit to develop good practice UVARs.

The ReVeAL toolkit consists of:

1. FACTSHEETS: A UVAR can be a simple or a complex measure. In order to understand what a complete UVAR “package” consists of, the ReVeAL approach analysed a wide range of UVAR schemes to identify the constituent components of the scheme. 33 UVAR “building blocks” were identified that can be combined to create a UVAR package. The building blocks were categorised into three measure fields: 1) spatial interventions, 2) pricing aspects and 3) regulatory measures, and below that into 12 sub-categories. Building blocks can be combined within or across the three measure fields to create a UVAR package. For each of the 33 identified building blocks, ReVeAL developed fact sheets. Each factsheet provides a definition, a description of its implementation, other building blocks that work well with it, a case example of its use and other useful information about it.
2. GUIDANCE: Cross-cutting themes are aspects that are relevant for all or several UVARs. They are “user needs and public acceptance”, “governance and finance”, “ensuring compliance”, and “complementary measures”. All those aspects and more are covered in online Guidance. The guidance also provides very valuable information on how to best approach developing your UVAR to guide you in the implementation and planning process. Each building block factsheet presented above contains links to the specific section in the ReVeAL Guidance to highlight aspects that should not go unnoticed.
3. DECISION SUPPORT TOOL: A publicly available decision support tool to suggest you a prioritised list of building blocks that might be most relevant for your city and potential UVAR area. The tool called AccessRegulationsForYourCity is very easy to use and consists of 14 questions that can be answered in roughly 10 minutes by a city representative who knows their local mobility context and goals well.

The toolkit is outlined in the tools section of the Eltis website here.

You can also find an article summarising ReVeAL here, and information and presentations from the final conference launching the toolkit here.