The contribution of urban mobility management to trip planning and the environmental upgrade of urban areas

The improvement of urban mobility has become a key concern to all institutions and researchers dealing with transport research. It was the vital need to change the “culture” of urban mobility promoting environmentally friendly modes of transport and the rational use of private car that forwarded Urban Mobility Centres in Greece and other countries. A modern and advanced Urban Mobility Centre for the city of Thessaloniki is under way and it is expected to offer to the citizens various services together with a Traffic Control Centre by the end of 2011. An innovativeness of the centre is the specialized service providing environmentally friendly routing, taking into account specific air pollutants, as the impact of the use of vehicles on the atmosphere, and existing -dynamically calculated - environmental conditions of the wider area. The paper deals with the need to organize such an Urban Mobility Centre. The methodology to approach the problem, in order to design the centre's services, is presented, as well as the expected contribution to the environmentally upgrading of the Metropolitan area of Thessaloniki.