What made this edition particularly special was the room itself. Researchers and practitioners joined us from Munich, Dresden, and Braunschweig, bringing together a diverse mix of perspectives on urban mobility, transport planning, and sustainability policy. The interdisciplinary energy in the room made for exactly the kind of critical, open debate that this workshop is designed to retrieve.

The Workshop:

At its core, the Extreme Policies Workshop asks a provocative question: what would it actually take to significantly reduce car use in a city? Rather than accepting the usual incremental measures, participants are invited to think boldly about policies that might be labelled "extreme" today but could become ordinary tomorrow.

The session opened with a look at the current modal splits in Munich and Braunschweig, and a frank discussion about whether electrification and automation alone are sufficient to meet sustainability goals. Drawing on the EU's climate neutrality targets and real-world examples from Bogotá's (Colombia) "No Car Day" and "Ciclovía", we explored how context shapes what we consider radical and what we consider normal.

The Policy Board Game:

The heart of the workshop is a structured policy board game built around 15 Mobility Policy Cards. Working in groups of three, participants: Analyzed the cards exploring measures ranging from speed limits and parking pricing to public transport fare reductions and space reallocation, ranked each policy on three dimensions: effectiveness (impact on car dependency and emissions), acceptability (to residents and decision-makers), and feasibility (implementation, cost, governance), built policy packages selecting 3–6 complementary measures to form a coherent strategy for Braunschweig, evaluated their chosen policies in depth defining scope, considering distributional impacts, and identifying tipping points at which a measure might become unacceptable.