In Finland, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans are best understood as part of a broader and long-established tradition of transport system planning and the integration of land use and transport policy. Transport system planning is carried out at several administrative levels: national, regional and urban-regional, and this multi-level structure forms the basis for how sustainable mobility is addressed in practice. Rather than emerging as a wholly separate planning instrument, the SUMP approach in Finland has developed on top of an already mature planning culture that combines transport, land use and long-term territorial development.

A central feature of the Finnish context is the strong role of city regions. Almost every city region in Finland has its own transport system plan, prepared jointly by municipalities within the city region and the regional Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment. This means that sustainable mobility planning in Finland has, to a large extent, already been organised at the scale of functional urban areas rather than only within the administrative borders of individual municipalities.

Another important element is the close link between transport planning and wider urban development agreements. In the seven largest Finnish urban regions: Helsinki, Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Kuopio and Lahti, the state has concluded land use, housing and transport agreements (MAL agreements) with city regions. These agreements are designed to strengthen cooperation between municipalities and between municipalities and central government, especially in matters related to urban structure, housing and transport coordination. As a result, sustainable mobility planning in Finland is closely connected to broader questions of metropolitan growth, urban structure and inter-municipal cooperation.

The Finnish context is also characterised by the coexistence of several related planning instruments. In addition to city-regional transport system plans, municipalities and city regions prepare energy and climate strategies, traffic safety plans, walking and cycling programmes and other strategic documents that address mobility in different ways. This means that Finnish SUMP-type planning is often embedded in a wider ecosystem of plans rather than concentrated in one single document type.

At the same time, Finland has moved beyond purely indirect alignment with SUMP principles. There are already 11 sustainable mobility plans in Finland fulfilling the key elements of the SUMP model, and these plans focus on promoting sustainable urban mobility, reducing transport emissions and creating a sustainable living environment. In practice, Finland therefore combines a strong pre-existing tradition of transport system planning with a gradual, more explicit adoption of the SUMP model in selected cities and city regions.

Compared with countries where SUMP implementation has mainly been introduced through one dedicated national programme, Finland stands out for embedding sustainable mobility planning within a broader national and regional planning architecture. Its distinctive feature is not the existence of one single nationwide SUMP template, but the fact that the key components of the SUMP approach – multimodal planning, coordination with land use, cooperation at city-region level and monitoring – are already deeply integrated into the Finnish planning system.