News

The FastTrack team recently came together to reflect and report on what we accomplished in our project’s first year. Having our work all compiled in one place was a great reminder of both the promise of the project, and of our successes so far.

Much of this work has been done “internally” within our Community of Local Affiliates, Local Ambassadors, Technical Experts, and suppliers. In this article, we get to share some of our year one highlights publicly.

Learning

FastTrack is well on its way towards helping European local areas to learn how to more swiftly roll-out mobility innovations.

The FastTrack programme of work, learning programme, and Capacity Building Handbook have set us up for success. Following this programme, and making use of the Capacity Building Handbook, will ensure that FastTrack local areas are able to hone their skills in quickly rolling-out mobility solutions. What’s more, a “FastRead” summarises the main aspects of the learning programme in just one page to make it easy for others to replicate and apply our programme.

Our Local Affiliates’ learning programme is structured around five Capacity Building Weeks (CBWs), with interim knowledge-building activities between each CBW. To date, we have hosted one CBW and are about to kick off our second Week (on 29 March!). Knowledge-building activities between Weeks have further honed our local areas’ skills.

A large part of building capacity is learning from and applying the experiences of those who have come before you. FastTrack has launched a (public!) searchable database of State-of-the-Art cases of cities speedily deploying mobility innovations.

Connecting

Between CBWs, FastTrack local areas join interim learning events, such as webinars. While these events are primarily only open to the FastTrack Community, we have involved other leading mobility projects, such as CIVITAS Handshake and ULaaDS, to ensure that our Community is connected to and can learn from other projects’ expertise.

We have also convened an Advisory Board to help review and advise our Community, and to ensure that FastTrack is connected to broader mobility processes and leaders. One unique aspect of our Advisory Board, is that it was convened partially by inviting key Board Members, but also with an open call for Board Members. This open call invited non-professional sustainable mobility advocates to feed into our work, and has enabled us to have a more diverse Advisory Board that represents more than just the “usual suspects”.

Deploying

FastTrack’s first Call for Suppliers generated great responses! We now have an internal supplier registry of almost 30 solutions providers ready to work with the FastTrack Community to provide solutions ready to be quickly deployed. Suppliers have connected directly with our local areas, and FastTrack has worked with them to record and share “solution pitches” with our local areas.

Stay tuned: the next Capacity Building week starts in just a few days, and we will be sharing live updates throughout.