AET General Assembly 2022

During ETC 2022 the members of AET came together on Thursday for the annual General Assembly.

As the council Chair, Olga Feldman, was not able to be present during the meeting we were skilfully chaired by the deputy chair of the council Oliver Charlesworth.

The General Assembly (GA) started with a short introduction of the working group structure by Oliver. The working groups would later present their progress under the relevant items of the agenda.

Chair of the board Hermann Maier presented the progress of the Association. Due to the Covid Pandemic, and the settlement of a historic financial issue, AET has seen challenging times. Nonetheless AET was able to come out of this with success.

Two successful online - though loss making - conferences were organised, maintaining the profile and publications. Also during the pandemic, starting with the initiative of the ‘AET Covid-19 conversations’, the Transport and Mobility Forum was initiated. We now return to a well-attended in-person conference, with a promising line of future conference locations.

Also in 2022 the AET service, and ETC delivery contracts were re-tendered to TfTP. AET is happy to keep working with this trusted partner.

The working groups reported their progress. First the Transport and Mobility Forum (TMF), the follow-up of the Covid-19 discussion series.

To date 21 interesting, and well attended, online webinars were organised by TMF with in total 1000+ attendees from 60+ countries. The TMF is a valuable new initiative started during the pandemic that by now has gained a firm position as one of the important membership benefits of AET.

Further work to improve awareness of AET is done by the Ambassador Network that is growing with new members from Germany, Portugal and Sweden. Additional ambassadors are very welcome to join the group, and members are encouraged to contact Pierluigi Coppola to bring in new ambassadors.

The working group on peer reviewed publications is now working together with ECTRI and ETRR (European Transport Research Review). Also a selection of papers on freight and logistics as well as Covid-related papers were published. A new collaboration for publications is set up with the Journal of Urban Mobility.

The terms of office of the board were presented. The board will continue in the current composition. In due course a new member will be sought, as Pierluigi Coppola will step down when the responsibilities for publications and international relations are handed over.

Ideally the board would welcome a female new member and members are encouraged to suggest candidates to Hermann or other board members. The treasurer Barry Zondag presented the annual report. It is encouraging that membership of AET is increasing.

Membership income is stable and non-payment is very low. The last year AET has run a deficit, mainly from calculated losses for the online ETC.

Investments other than for TMF and the website were postponed to minimise the financial impact of the Covid-years. Thanks to four surplus generating years before Covid, AET was able to take these losses. In addition to the loss making years a historic financial issue was settled by an extraordinary General Assembly in January 2022.

The accounts are finalised and presented in the Annual Report. The financial statement that also is required as agreed in the extraordinary GA of January was unfortunately not ready in time for the GA. The GA decided that the treasurer would report back to the members by email after receiving the financial statement. The discharge of board for the accounts will then be settled by email. The GA thanked the board for their efforts and reporting.

Remko Smit presented the proposed changes to the statutes. The statutes will be changed to accommodate for online meetings in the future, implement some changes in the procedure to issue awards, comply to new legislation and finally to introduce the membership category ‘academic institutions’. The General Assembly approved of the changes and thanked the Board for their efforts.

András Munkácsy presented the proposed nominees for the awards to be issued this year for the first time. The Committee proposed Jeffrey Howard for the Excellence Award, Broos Baanders for the Fellowship Award and Sally Scarlett for the Honorary Fellowship Award. All nominations were approved by the General Assembly and would be presented to the recipients during the ETC50 session at the conference that afternoon.

After this Oliver Charlesworth presented the results of the council elections. The members stepping down were thanked for their efforts and new members were welcomed.

A special thanks went out to Olga Feldman, who is stepping down as chair of the council, for her excellent work for AET over the last years.

Remko Smit
Secretary