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This November, the FastTrack community came together to inspire each other, set community members up for success, and to connect with suppliers of sustainable mobility and transport innovations.

Throughout the FastTrack project, its community of 24 local areas and 11 project partners will convene five times for intensive “capacity building weeks” (CBWs). Each CBW plays a role in helping the local areas to craft Innovation Deployment Plans that will fast track local roll-out of sustainable mobility and transport innovations.

The first CBW focused on getting inspired and meeting suppliers. The event programme included discussions among the FastTrack community as a whole on mobility as a driver for sustainability, on making collaboration between suppliers and local authorities work, and a virtual tour of sustainable mobility innovations (and challenges) from our host city of Freiburg (Germany).

These group discussions were complimented by structured brainstorming, capacity building and learning opportunities in smaller cluster groups. In fact, FastTrack local areas will work in their clusters – which span sustainable & clean urban logistics; cycling in the urban & functional urban area; integrated multi-modal mobility solutions; and traffic & demand management – throughout the project.

This first CBW provided clusters with an opportunity to convene all together for the first time, to ‘set the scene’ by defining current trends and challenges by cluster, to be inspired by each other’s work so far in this cluster, and to begin defining more specific objectives for what each local area will accomplish via FastTrack.

Because of their nature and goals, it is important for CBWs to be places where local areas feel safe to experiment and brainstorm freely. However, a keynote discussion with Jill Warren (European Cyclists’ Federation) and Johanna Tzanidaki (ERTICO) on mobility innovation as a driver for sustainability, as well as a panel discussion among Katia Kishchenko (City of Antwerp), Karen Simons (Rebel Group), and Julian Scriven (Brompton) on partnerships among local authorities and suppliers, were enlightening not only for the FastTrack community, but for a wide diversity of mobility leaders. As such, these two plenary discussions were recorded and are available to revisit on the FastTrack YouTube playlist.

The first FastTrack Capacity Building Week was a great success, with participants leaving inspired and energised. Thanks to the event, local areas have made progress on so-called “Innovation Diaries”, which will help them to create their Deployment Plans. Furthermore, local areas connected with suppliers of innovative solutions, who had been vetted and hand selected by FastTrack partners due to their unique and relevant expertise.

The FastTrack community will have access to a series of online knowledge-building activities in the coming months, and will all re-convene in March 2022 in Stockholm (Sweden) for the next CBW, which will focus on connecting with peers, policy makers and local officials who are implementing innovative mobility solutions.