Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) or similar documents from 17 European capitals
(published between 2010 and 2021) and the European SUMP guidelines have been analysed
to understand how cities shape mobility and their transport systems. Text analysis
is applied to identify development tendencies in a time- and cost-effective manner,
without relying on traditional deep semantic analysis techniques. In addition to traditional
statistical indicators, we introduce Category Term Frequency (CTF) as a new measure
in text analysis. CTF reveals the number and proportion of words belonging to the
same content group, namely specific mobility-related categories. The results indicate
that categories describing general aspects such as the future, general transport,
environment, and society are more prominently represented compared to more forward-looking
categories like automation, electromobility, and sharing. The aggregated CTF of categories
describing these emerging aspects is highest in the mobility plans of Copenhagen,
Helsinki, Luxembourg, and Vienna, which are considered forerunners in their implementation.
In general, the analysis concludes that despite recent technological developments
and new business models, the examined mobility plans barely mention terms that would
imply radical changes by the 2030s. Strategic documents and, thus, urban mobility
developments suggest only a slow transition towards the expected levels of sustainable
and smart urban mobility. These findings may contribute to understanding and (re)considering
urban and transport development strategies in Europe. Furthermore, this text analysis
framework provides planners and other experts with a novel tool to identify the focal
areas of mobility-related (or other) documents.