Sustainable urban mobility indicators: policy versus practice in the case of Greek cities

Nowadays, the significant economic and social changes that are taking place as well as the emergence of environment protection makes the need for sustainable urban mobility planning more and more necessary. Although sustainability is difficult to be measured directly, it can be evaluated through a system of parameters which reflect its dimensions. Indicators constitute part of this process and since their first establishment in 1992 by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development they are being increasingly accepted as a tool for the assessment of the sustainable urban mobility mainly due to their simplicity in communicating complex phenomena. However, despite the great usage of indicator sets, there are still many issues to be addressed. In specific the large number of indicators makes, in the most of the cases, the evaluation process expensive, lengthy and in many occasions unsuccessful due to the absence of relevant data, especially in urban areas lacking organised databases such as Greek cities. The current paper reviews a considerable number of sustainable urban mobility indicators from the literature, examines the data availability, frequency and reliability in the city of Thessaloniki and finally argues towards an efficient, realistic and comprehensive indicator system as an evaluation tool of the mobility conditions in the Greek urban areas.