WSSTL 2025

The inaugural World Symposium on Sustainable Transport and Livability (WSSTL-2025) will bring together over 300-400 delegates—including leading researchers, policymakers, practitioners and community advocates—from more than 10 countries. Organised by Department of Civil Engineering at IISc Bengaluru, which is celebrating its 75th year since inception, together with the Special Interest Group on Sustainable Transport & Livability (SIG-F4) of the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS), the three-day event is set to feature pre-symposium workshop, keynote sessions, plenary discussions, technical sessions and interactive community engagement sessions.

The first keynote presentation of the symposium on June 25 is by Prof. Guenter Emberger, TU Vienna, Austria, speaking on “Are Sustainability and Quality of Life and the Choice of Means of Transport Related?”; it continues on June 26 when Prof. Maria Attard, University of Malta, presents her keynote address on “What Affects Walking? Designing Action Research to Engage Citizens”. The three keynotes conclude on June 27 with Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy, McGill University, discussing “How Daily Travel Contributes to Quality of Life: Lessons from the Canadian Context.”

Altogether 12 plenary sessions – curated and moderated by ICCT, GIZ, K-RIDE, WRI, IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab), AM-CoE, Uber India, and DPIIT—will discuss zero-emission buses, gender-inclusive living-lab insights, multimodal integration, active-mobility promotion and the institutional reforms needed for sustainable and livable cities.

Parallel technical sessions will focus on findings on data-driven and research based Quality of Life indices, health-impact assessments, resilience analytics and policy frameworks, covered in about 20 peer-reviewed accepted papers.

WSSTL-2025 also emphasises community engagement and sustainable event practices. Case studies from Bengaluru’s walkable-corridor pilots, Inner Ring Road multimodal upgrades and Pimpri-Chinchwad’s car-free market experiments are to be showcased.