Two lead-author contributions from Mobilissimus. One message: “Central and Eastern European public transport doesn’t need billion-euro infrastructure to come back to life — it needs data, planning, and a planner in the room.”
From 18 to 21 May 2026, Budapest hosted Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2026 — Europe’s flagship transport research and innovation conference, gathering roughly 3,000 researchers, policymakers, operators and industry leaders under the banner “Re-Generation in Transport”. Mobilissimus was present with two lead-author contributions, both addressing the gap between how urban mobility is or should be planned and how it is actually delivered across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Both posters sparked the interest and curiosity of the participants.
András Ekés and Dragoș Hrițuleac at the TRA2026
Two papers, one CEE reality
András Ekés presented “Enhancing the Attractiveness of Public Transport through Realistic and Scalable Improvements in Central and Eastern Europe” — a methodology distilled from years of work in Nyíregyháza, Siófok, Esztergom and Brașov. The argument is uncomfortable but optimistic: CEE cities do not need massive capital programmes to reverse passenger decline. They need data-driven networks, interval-based timetables coordinated with rail, employer-focused routes — and a planner who can mediate between municipalities and operators. Siófok’s almost 90% revenue increase in the 2022 summer peak, achieved without adding a single vehicle, makes the case better than any slide could.
Dragoș Hrițuleac together with Zsófia Ghira and András Ekés investigated “Mobility’s Blind Spot: Transport Poverty in the CEE space”, drawing on fieldwork in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county (HU) and the Brașov–Întorsura Buzăului corridor (RO). The paper introduces the Survey & Solution Toolkit (SST) — an Excel-based diagnostic with 67 indicators across seven categories and up to 60 prioritised recommendations, built for the local authorities and operators who actually have to act on transport poverty. The finding that has the most policy weight: in CEE, the blind spot isn’t mainly affordability. It’s availability, accessibility, time poverty, and a public transport system still treated as a basic social service rather than a credible alternative to the car.
Mobilissimus posters at TRA 2026
Where Mobilissimus and the TRA 2026 agenda met
The TRA 2026 programme leaned hard into the themes that sit at the core of our daily work. Two strategic sessions, in particular, could have been written from our project files:
“Tackling transport poverty through seamless and sustainable mobility” — a direct mirror of Dragoș’s paper and of our ongoing work on transport poverty diagnostics across Hungary and Romania.
“Multimodal mobility services for passengers and goods in suburban and rural areas” — the exact space in which our network-restructuring projects (Siófok, Nyíregyháza, Brașov) operate.
Layered in the conference’s four pillars — user-centred mobility, decarbonisation, resilient planning and operation, and digitalisation — and the overlap with the Mobilissimus portfolio is hard to miss: SUMPs, network and timetable redesign, Brașov’s green-mobility transition and the Survey & Solution Toolkit for transport poverty fit well in the framework proposed by the conference organisers.
For Mobilissimus, TRA 2026 confirmed two things. First, that “realistic and scalable” is no longer the polite alternative to “ambitious” — in resource-constrained contexts, it is the ambitious choice. Second, that the CEE perspective is increasingly part of the European mobility conversation, not a footnote to it. We will keep building the methodologies, tools and partnerships that turn that conversation into actual buses, trains, timetables and journeys — for the people who depend on them.
Fotó: TRA
Read more about our projects here:
https://mobilissimus.hu/en/projects/mobility-poverty-and-accessibility-assessments
https://mobilissimus.hu/index.php/en/news/mobility-poverty-unspoken-about-everywhere
https://mobilissimus.hu/index.php/en/news/destinations-out-reach-analysing-challenges-accessibility
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvGbpXu7htM
