About the campaign

Smart Move – a joint industry initiative to promote a greater use of buses and coaches worldwide.

I. What is Smart Move?

Smart Move is a global awareness campaign initiated jointly by the IRU and Busworld which advocates the doubling of bus and coach use worldwide, as they are the safest, most environmentally-friendly, affordable, user-friendly and efficient means of collective passenger transport.

Smart Move is endorsed by 85 committed partners around the world, including leading industry organisations, vehicle manufacturers and media, as well as thousands of bus/coach operators and individual supporters, sharing the values and advocating the objective of the campaign.
  

Read more about the Smart Move campaign

II. Why are we campaigning?

Governments all over the world are looking for ways to increase safety on their roads, reduce damage done to the environment and meet their citizens’ needs with the least amount of time and money.

Buses and coaches offer an optimal solution to a range of current mobility challenges facing modern societies, including climate change, road safety, connectivity, social inclusion and congestion, to name but a few.

Read more about the role of bus and coach transport in the mobility chain

Regrettably, citizens, politicians and mass media are often unaware of this reality. On the contrary, buses and coaches are often wrongly associated by politicians and the public with problems commonly attributed to road transport, such as pollution and congestion.

This misperception has led to a situation where buses and coaches are not only underperforming in terms of their contribution to society, but also suffer from political negligence and often improper, non-adapted and even restrictive legislation.

Read more about buses and coaches in today's transport system

III. How to achieve our goal?

The Smart Move campaign aims at changing this state of play by providing to policy and opinion makers updated facts and figures to ensure an informed debate in policy-making processes and tools to encourage people to switch from cars to buses and coaches whenever possible.

To allow bus and coach transport to live up to their full potential in providing green, safe, efficient and affordable mobility services to all, it is crucial to promote and further facilitate their operations by implementing simple, affordable and judicious measures. This would be the ultimate Smart Move!
 
Smart Move therefore aims to raise political and media awareness that the sustainable mobility solutions we seek is at our fingertips, simply by doubling the use of bus and coach transport worldwide. In Europe alone, such an increase would have the following impact:

• A reduction in CO2 emissions by at least 50 million tonnes per year;
• A reduction in fatalities on EU roads and streets, by more than 3000 per year;  
• A significant reduction of congestions in cities at zero cost for taxpayers, as a result of the expected 10-15% reduction in car traffic;
• The creation of 4 million new jobs.

By documenting and advocating the implementation of policies that support and incentivise bus and coach travel at local, national, regional and global level, hundreds of millions of cars can be taken off the road, thus dramatically contributing to road safety and carbon reduction targets of governments throughout the globe, to everybody’s benefit.