The project has made an important contribution to the way sustainable mobility planning is conceived, both in the scholarly debate and also in policy-making. This contribution has three dimensions:
1) Demonstrating the limited capacity of small organisations to engage with the debate around workplace sustainable mobility as it is currently framed, given their limited financial resources and specialist transport expertise;
2) Highlighting cases where workplace mobility planning, even when it is informal and ad-hoc, can improve not only the environmental impact of commuting, but also the socio-economic conditions of precarious workers;
3) Incorporating the commuting experiences and practices of those employees who do not have 9-to-5 schedules into the narrow definition of the commute which explicitly or implicitly informs sustainable mobility planning.
The analysis highlighted the extent to which sustainable urban mobility planning remains focused on the peak morning and evening hours, and on white-collar commuters. The project has highlighted the ways in which shift work combined with low pay involves a different set of commuting experiences and constraints. For example, commuters whose travel needs are poorly served by public transport, often pay more for the same journey than someone working a 9-to-5 job. In the case of tourism and hospitality workers, this is often combined with a lower and more precarious income. The experiences of night commuters documented as part of the SuMAC project were especially stark in this context. They highlighted the need to consider further dimensions of the commute beyond environmental impact and affordability: for example, for many of them, personal safety was a key consideration shaping commuting habits. The collaboration with local government stakeholders in Sofia has resulted in an expanded perspective on how strategies for promoting workplace sustainable mobility planning should be devised; such strategies had previously been focused almost exclusively on the city’s burgeoning IT sector. In Brussels, the findings related to the night-time commutes of precarious workers have contributed to the city’s recent efforts to devise a policy agenda for governing the night-time city, and night-time mobility in particular. These issues have been disseminated through the Steering Committee of the Brussels Centre Observatory, of which Dr Anna Plyushteva became a member during the SuMAC action. The findings from the project have also served as the basis for further project proposals on night-time commuting, intended to support follow-up research to SuMAC.
As part of SuMAC, the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research at the VUB collaborated with Sofia University and the University of National and World Economy to organise a three-day international conference in Sofia in June 2018. The event brought together academic researchers, local government actors and activists, and served as an excellent platform for the dissemination of the SuMAC project findings. The conference has resulted in a special issue on night-time mobility, governance and inclusion, co-edited by Dr Anna Plyushteva, which will be published in the UNWE Yearbook in late 2019. The project findings were also presented in a series of international conferences, notably the NIGHTS 2018 conference held in Brussels in November 2018, in which Dr Anna Plyushteva presented the project findings and co-organised a session on opportunities for collaboration with non-academic stakeholders. Two academic journal articles (authored by Dr Anna Plyushteva) reporting on the project findings were already published in 2018. A journal article co-authored by Dr Plyushteva and Prof Boussauw is in preparation for submission. Two further publications (one chapter in an edited volume, and one journal article) will be submitted in the second half of 2019.
