Visegrad Fund

About the Workshop

The Workshop aims to gather 8 to 10 participating technical universities (4 Visegrad, at least 3 EU and 2WB). It focuses on students (4 from each country) as future experts in traffic engineering and making stronger connections between them, bust professional knowledge and intercultural exchange. They will work on real traffic problems in cities that are becoming more crowded and heavily populated.

Workshop will allow participants to work on real traffic problems in host city, city of Belgrade. Experienced teachers will share their knowledge, and students will get to know how their colleagues think and exchange ideas. We believe that it is very useful to constantly exchange knowledge, best practice and ideas especially because of the difference in development levels between Visegrad, other EU and WB countries. This point is very important, especially in the world of constant change and where the pace of technological advance is getting faster each moment. Workshop is alive for 30 years, constantly connecting students, teachers and engineers from European countries, bringing the positive changes back to cities and towns.

History (Belgrade 2017)

Workshop is alive for 30 years, constantly connecting students, teachers and engineers from European countries, bringing the positive changes back to cities and towns. Previously it was organized in Visegrad countries: 2019 in Krakow, 2023 in Gyor, 2025 in Zlin, and in the next two years it should be organized in Poland again. Networking students of Visegrad and other European countries will continue educating new generations of traffic engineers with important international experience in solving traffic problems in cities based on principals of sustainability.

Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, University of Belgrade, organized traditional student workshop „City and Traffic” in 2017 in Belgrade. Annual workshop that has been held since 1996, gathered students of traffic engineering from 9 European countries at the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, University of Belgrade, being an equal participant since 2011, as the only institution from non-EU countries. Workshop has been held from 10th to 14th of July 2017 and it dealt with specific urban traffic problems in the city of Belgrade. The teams representing each country consisted of a supervisor (teaching staff from University or member of the Institute) and up to five students who worked in mixed teams. This way, in addition to encouraging international students and research institutions cooperation, workshop contributed to the exchange of professional experience in the field of traffic engineering and intercultural exchange.

To have a better understanding of how the workshop realy looks like, you can download and explore the report from the City and Traffic workshop in Belgrade 2017.

Partners institutions

The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

The partners in this event are listed below.

• Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
• Faculty of Civil Engineering, Krakow
• Department of Transportation Infrastructure and Municipal Engineering
• Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of transportation Sciences
• Bauhaus-University Weimar
• Institute for Transport Studies, Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Sciences, BOKU
• Department of Transportation Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Maribor
• Facuty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, Belgrade

Objectives and workshop execution

The cities and towns are becoming more crowded and heavily populated. It is estimated that close to 70% of the population will live in the cities until 2050. Visegrad, Balkan and EU region municipalities face the same problem since traffic problems in towns and cities are getting more extensive: traffic congestions, pollution, noise etc. because of the increase in number and the use of passenger cars (in the municipalities in Serbia the number of passenger cars (PC) is increased by the rate of 40-50 PC/1000 inhabitants in a 5-year period). Congestion in the cities is increasing and Visegrad region have greater traffic jams than in German, Austrian and Slovenian cities according to Traffic Index ranking (https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/), where cities like Lodz (PL), Budapest (HU) and Brno (CZ) are at the bottom of the list. Consequently, more and more space in being occupied by cars. So the focus of workshop is on joint work of students, teachers and local authorities on new solutions for traffic problems based on principals of sustainability and resilience. Contemporary approach in solving traffic problems in EU cities and towns is based on sustainability principles and seeks to minimize social, environmental and economic effects. We steer towards relatively cheap but sustainable solutions for traffic problems incorporating urban design, emphasizing the promotion of non-motorized modes of transport, traffic calming and “design for all” concept. Topics of resilience are also involved and incorporated into the brainstorming taking place at the Workshop.

Working part of the Workshop will mostly be executed FTTE, Belgrade during 5 days (one classroom per group). Ceremony hall will be used for official opening (day 1) and final presentations (day 5). Day 1: Each group will discuss about their task with the assistance of local students using available traffic data (traffic situation, traffic loads, accident statistics etc.). They will also discuss about the best approach to analyze the problem, visit the location, organize survey and collect information, and document it. Day 2: Group will analyze current state, discuss all individual observations under the supervision of professor and finalize the first poster presenting the current state. Each group discusses a lot of different solutions or variants and decide to develop two solutions as the major outcome that will find it's place at the Workshop final report. Day 3: Finalizing the poster presenting in detail the first solution. Day 4: Finalizing the second solution. While working on solutions, under the professor’s supervision, the sketch of solutions evaluation is being developed. Day 5: Final poster summarizes the evaluation process and emphasizes pros and cons of both solutions. In parallel, group design and prepare the final presentation in which all students must take part in, and present the final result of their work. The supervisor is constantly present, steering toward sustainable traffic solutions and enabling knowledge and idea sharing, and creation of new ideas.

Contact

For additional information, please send a mail to address v.djoric@sf.bg.ac.rs