Harmonised urban mobility indicators: what Regulation (EU) 2026/1554 requires of Spain's 49 urban nodes

Until now, every European city measured its mobility as it could and as it saw fit. Comparing the modal split of Seville with that of Bordeaux called for a warning, before anything else, that the two figures did not mean the same thing. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1554 of 9 July 2026 puts an end to that situation within the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T): it sets a closed list of eleven indicators, the method for obtaining each one and the date on which they must be submitted.

It was published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) on 10 July 2026 and entered into force on 30 July 2026. It is a regulation, so it is directly applicable in Spain with no need for transposition.

Where the obligation comes from

Regulation (EU) 2024/1679, which lays down the Union guidelines for the development of the TEN-T, strengthened the role of urban nodes: the large urban areas where ports, airports, railway stations, logistics platforms and freight terminals meet the regional and local transport networks. In Spain, under Article 40 of that regulation, 49 urban nodes were identified on the basis of population criteria and of the representativeness of the NUTS basic regions, the European Union's Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics.

Article 41 of the same regulation placed two obligations on every urban node with a deadline of 31 December 2027: to adopt and implement a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) aligned with the guidelines in its Annex V, and to collect and submit urban mobility data to the Commission in the fields of sustainability, safety and accessibility. That second obligation was left incomplete at the time, because it was not yet known which data, measured how and at what intervals, and these are precisely the points that Regulation (EU) 2026/1554 now settles.

The timetable worth noting

Article 6 requires that, before 31 December 2026, the Member State notify the Commission of the list of local administrative unit (LAU) codes, as defined in Article 4 of Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003, that delimit the data collection scope of each urban node. It is an unremarkable date and yet a decisive one, because it conditions everything that follows.

Article 5 sets the remaining deadlines:

• The ordinary submission takes place before 31 December 2027 and every four years thereafter. The data must be the most recent and up to date available at the time of submission.
• By way of exception, the first data set may be submitted up to 31 December 2028, provided that the Member State notifies its intention to make use of that delay before 31 December 2027. The postponement does not alter the timetable for subsequent submissions.
• Also by way of exception, the indicator on the number of trips by mode may be submitted every five years if the Member State notifies that decision before 31 December 2027.
• The safety indicators are reported by year. Since submission is on a four-yearly cycle, each submission must cover the four intervening years; where that is not possible, the available years are provided and the remainder is completed in the following reporting exercise.
• If no new information has been generated or collected since the previous submission, the same data is sent again together with an explanatory note stating the reasons for the repetition and setting out an update plan for the following exercise.

The eleven indicators, one by one

The annex groups the indicators in four blocks and, for each one, prescribes the method of obtaining it. That second part matters as much as the first, since it determines who takes on the work.

Horizontal aspects

• HO.1. Total number of people with their usual residence in the geographical scope, broken down by sex and age group. The Commission extracts it from the data published by Eurostat; where there is no geolocated data, the Member State takes it from the most recent population census.
• HO.2. Surface area of the geographical scope, in square kilometres, according to the delimitation under Article 6. Extracted by the Commission from Eurostat, under the same fallback rule.
• HO.3. Total number of access points, understood as predefined locations where passengers can board or alight from a regular transport service. It is obtained with the same methods already used in compliance with Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/1926 on multimodal travel information services.

Sustainability

• SU.1. Number of daily trips within the geographical scope broken down into five modes: walking, cycling, individual motorised transport, public transport and other. Surveys, mobile phone data, a transport model or other big data sources are all admissible. Where a trip chains several stages in different modes, the main mode is reported.
• SU.2. Stock of passenger cars registered in the scope, in matrix form, cross-tabulating type of motive energy (petrol including hybrids, diesel including hybrids, plug-in hybrid petrol and plug-in hybrid diesel, zero-emission battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and other), Euro standard category (1 to 4, 5 to 6c, 6d and 7) and ownership (natural person or legal person). It is extracted from the vehicle register.

Safety

• SA.1. Number of road accidents per year.
• SA.2. Number of people seriously injured per year, broken down by sex, age, type of traffic unit used by the injured person and other main vehicle involved.
• SA.3. Number of fatalities per year, with the same breakdown.

All three are extracted by the Commission from the Community road accident database (CARE). Only where no geolocated data exists does it fall to the Member State to obtain them from police accident reports and hospital records, in compliance with the rules governing access to that information. An emergency rule is provided for serious injuries: where the severity data is not available, the total number of injured people is reported and the Commission is informed of this.

Accessibility

• AC.1. Number of access points with four or more scheduled departures per peak hour and per route, on at least one route. The Member State determines the timing and duration of the peak hours, which must include at least one morning hour and one afternoon hour of an ordinary working day.
• AC.2. Total number of railway stations in the scope, extracted from the European Railway Station Accessibility Database (ERSAD).
• AC.3. Number of those stations declared accessible, with a demanding list of conditions: step-free access from a car park with spaces for people with reduced mobility and from a stop of another transport mode, dynamic audible and visual information, an information desk accessible from a wheelchair and fitted with an induction loop, accessible ticket sales, tactile and braille signage, accessible platforms with continuous tactile walking surface indicators, and access to trains at the same level or with free assistance when boarding and alighting.

SU.1: the indicator that decides the quality of the whole

The regulation allows four routes for estimating the modal split, and they are not equivalent in cost, in precision or in bias. A well-designed household mobility survey captures trip purpose and short walking trips, which is precisely what mobile phone data captures worst. The latter, by contrast, offers continuous temporal coverage and far larger samples, at the cost of a modal imputation that in dense urban settings readily confuses cycling with the bus. A transport model reproduces scenarios, but inherits the biases of the survey it was calibrated with.

To that choice is added a second decision that the regulation itself requires to be declared: whether the trips counted are those made by people with their usual residence in the scope or all trips made within it. In nodes with heavy inbound mobility from the metropolitan ring that difference is substantial, and on it depends whether the figure is comparable with that of another European city which has taken the opposite approach.

Article 3 adds a requirement that should not be underrated: the Member State must ensure that the chosen method provides good quality data and make the methodology available to the Commission upon request. In practice that means the methodological report ceases to be internal documentation of the study and becomes material open to external review.

Territorial delimitation and its friction with the functional urban area

Article 6 establishes that the scope of each node is made up of one or more complete local administrative units, that its boundaries coincide with those of those units, and that the same code may not be assigned to two urban nodes. The data submitted must cover the whole of the scope so delimited. Any subsequent change requires reasoned notification before 31 December of the year preceding the reporting exercise.

A tension arises here that is worth anticipating. The guidelines in Annex V to Regulation (EU) 2024/1679 ask that the SUMP be drawn up for the functional urban area, that is, for the real extent of everyday travel, which almost never coincides with an administrative boundary. Regulation (EU) 2026/1554, by contrast, requires reporting on complete local administrative units. The two criteria are compatible provided that the work is planned that way from the outset: the fieldwork is sized on the functional area and the results are built so that they can afterwards be aggregated by administrative unit. If the sample is not stratified with that in mind, the node will have a sound SUMP and will still be unable to derive from it the figure it has to submit.

How it fits with Ley 9/2025 and with the EDIM

Three regimes now converge on a Spanish municipality that is an urban node:

1. Regulation (EU) 2024/1679, which requires a SUMP adopted and in application before 31 December 2027 and the submission of urban mobility data.
2. Regulation (EU) 2026/1554, which specifies which data and by when.
3. Ley 9/2025, de 3 de diciembre, de Movilidad Sostenible (the Spanish Sustainable Mobility Act), which imposes the SUMP on municipalities of more than 50,000 inhabitants, ties it to access to state transport funding and creates the Entidad Gestora de la Información de la Movilidad (EDIM, the body managing mobility information) with its own common framework of indicators.

It follows from all this that a single field campaign has to serve all three regimes. Designing the mobility survey with the SUMP alone in mind, and finding out afterwards that it does not allow SU.1 to be built with the breakdown and the universe required by the annex, means repeating the most expensive item in the whole process. The Ministerio de Transportes y Movilidad Sostenible (MITMS, the Spanish ministry of transport and sustainable mobility) has already published a guide on aligning SUMPs with the Annex V guidelines, which is best read alongside the regulation rather than separately.

We examine the obligations under Ley 9/2025 in detail in this article on the sustainable mobility act (in Spanish) and the methodology of the fieldwork in pedestrian and cycling mobility studies (in Spanish).

A limitation worth pointing out

The accessibility block of the annex measures, strictly speaking, three things: service frequency at access points, number of railway stations and the physical accessibility conditions of those stations. It measures, in short, connectivity and infrastructure, and leaves out accessibility in the sense the discipline has given the term for decades: the ease with which a person reaches the opportunities they need, be it employment, healthcare, education or retail, within a reasonable time and at an affordable cost.

The objection is a fair one and it has surfaced in the technical debate that followed the adoption of the regulation. It should be understood, however, on its own terms: this is a lowest common denominator built from what can be collected consistently across twenty-seven Member States, not a complete management dashboard. Nothing prevents, and everything recommends, that each node's SUMP also incorporate indicators of accessibility to opportunities and of transport affordability, which are the ones that genuinely inform local decisions. The regulation ensures that the figures are comparable with one another, without claiming that they suffice to govern local mobility.

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The Member State shall ensure that the data collection method chosen provides good quality data and shall make the collection methodology available to the Commission upon request.

What should be done over the coming months

The deadline looks more comfortable than it is. A household mobility survey in a medium-sized city requires, between sample design, fieldwork, data cleaning and grossing up, a period of several months, and the methodologically suitable windows for fieldwork are spring and autumn. Counting backwards from December 2027, and setting aside the time taken by the procurement procedure, the effective margin for starting the work runs out well before the date in the regulation suggests.

Fuentes oficiales

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1554 of 9 July 2026

DOUE | 10 de julio de 2026

Adoption notice and texts of the regulation and its annex

Comisión Europea | Dirección General de Movilidad y Transportes

Regulation (EU) 2024/1679 on the Union guidelines for the development of the TEN-T

DOUE | 28 de junio de 2024

Urban nodes of the TEN-T network in Spain

MITMS

Guide to aligning SUMPs with the Annex V guidelines of Regulation (EU) 2024/1679

MITMS | Febrero de 2026

Ley 9/2025, de 3 de diciembre, de Movilidad Sostenible

BOE