QUEST has engaged in the audit and certification of the actual quality level of urban mobility policies in nearly 50 midsized cities in at least 14 EU-countries.
QUEST is a Quality Management method to help small- and medium-sized cities to set up and further develop their sustainable mobility policies and actions with the assistance of an external expert – the QUEST auditor. QUEST is not a tool box with ready-to-use sustainable mobility solutions, nor is it a traditional transport engineering tool.
QUEST is not a beauty contest ! It does not attempt to benchmark one city against another.The methodology has its roots in Total Quality Management (TQM) and focuses on identifying promising development areas and supporting processes in the city to start improvements in these areas. QUEST acknowledges that every city has its own, specific context, and characteristics that need to be taken into consideration.QUEST recognizes that stepwise improvements are possible at all levels of development of sustainable mobility policy. Achieving sustainable mobility is not simply a case of copying best practice, but is a result of a continuous learning and implementation process that every city has to go through in order to achieve excellence.
The QUEST tool has been developed and tested by the project consortium, building on experiences with existing quality management tools, such as BYPAD, Mediate and EMAS, and the existing EU-guidance on Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans.
The emphasis of the QUEST tool is on stakeholder involvement. It aims to create a common problem understanding among local stakeholders, and to facilitate the development of viable policy actions and improvements to internal processes that can be implemented. The goal of QUEST is to facilitate and structure this process and help cities to help themselves. Quest requires the City Council to endorse the plan and start working on implementing the recommendations in it. A good action plan, according to Quest, is not necessarily an advanced plan, it is a plan that will be implemented. The purpose of Quest is ultimately to get improvements implemented and all stages of the methodology are instrumental to that purpose.