Before their scheduled study visit in July, IURC partners Busan and Rotterdam sat down for another bilateral meeting in May. As Busan will be hosting Rotterdam in July, Busan shared their upcoming study visit plan, while Rotterdam narrowed down their interests and potential topics of cooperation to explore during their study visit.
Rotterdam opened with a presentation sharing about Rotterdam’s mobility transition, smart mobility policy, and data usage tendencies. Although Dutch policy typically tends to favour cars, Rotterdam is aiming to become a city that prioritizes walking and cycling over cars and heavy-duty vehicles.
To move away from being a car-minded city, Rotterdam has identified 4 leading principles: prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport, clean and healthy connections, community participation, and vital economic traffic. During this bilateral meeting, they focused particularly on city logistics as one of the key actions to achieve the principle of vital economic traffic. In order to properly understand these principles, however, Rotterdam stressed that data is one of the most important factors to consider. By receiving, unlocking, and using data, the city can determine where attention needs to be paid and formulate actions to address needs. Based on data, to encourage clean and efficient city logistics, Rotterdam plans to expand the city logistics spaces by creating more distribution centers, hubs for cross-docking consolidation, and pick-up-and-drop-off places. This will allow the city to control overall traffic and utilize a traffic management system that can change the traffic flow by creating more spaces for inner-city pedestrians and cyclists. Rotterdam believes that resolving logistics issues will help to improve air pollution and energy consumption. Overall, better use of data will help Rotterdam to make a transition into clean and efficient operations.
Rotterdam’s visit to Busan is coming up in early July. As part of the preparation for the upcoming visit, Busan presented their draft study visit programme that will allow Rotterdam representatives to experience both technological and cultural aspects in Busan. On the list of potential destinations are Bus Rapid Transit implementation sites, Traffic Information Service Center, and the National Assembly Library, to show not only their technical side but also their cultural side. It will be the very first study visits for the EU-Korea pairings in IURC.
