AET 2020 Vision

The Association of European Transport was founded in 1997 to take over responsibility for overseeing the European Transport Conference (ETC) and the financial risk and making the event a truly European one. 

Over the years the AET has evolved and changed to stay relevant to the transport professionals and academic community. Building on over 40 years’ of amazing voluntary effort AET and ETC has changed with the times to reflect the needs of not only the profession but global thinking about transport, what it does, and what it should be doing in the future.

In 2012 the AET general assembly approved the 2020 vision with the ambition ‘to be the key influencer, contributor to and shaper of the debate connecting transport policy, practice and research at the European level’.

Evaluation of the new vision in 2016 learned that the ambition needs to be more aligned with the available resources for a membership based organization dependent on the voluntary effort of the members.

In 2017 the general assembly agreed with the proposal to focus the effort of the association to the following course of action:

• To continue with the ETC related activities and publications;
• To support additional events as opportunities present themselves mainly as adjuncts to ETC or Council/Board/Programme Committee meetings but to drop organising these as a major ambition of AET;
• To continue to improve the website and develop this further into an effective communication tool with members and the wider world;
• To continue to work towards closer integration with the programme committees.