1.1 Brief Overview

Texel is an island and a municipality of the province of North Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of approximately 13.700 people, it is the largest and most habited island of the West Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. It has a surface of 463,16 km2, of which only a third is land, and it is 24,7 km long and 9,5 km wide at its highest point.

Tourism in Texel represents around the 70% of the economy, leading to big fluctuations of visitors in high season period. Popular forms of tourism in the island are cycling, walking, swimming and horse riding.

The theme of the final booklet of our team is ‘How To Get There’. The goal of this topic is to design a sustainable mobility plan for the island. For doing so, the current mobility system will be analysed as a socio-technical system and some actors involved in it will be presented. Together with that, some existing sustainable projects for the island will be explained. After, the challenge that Texel is facing will be presented with a problem statement. Finally, we will look at islands with sustainable mobility projects and get ideas of the technological systems that could be applied in our island.

In order to achieve an operating sustainable project on this island, we have to understand that the application of technical innovations could not be isolated from its social context. The conflict between the technological advancement and related socio-political decisions is always an issue to be considered for projects in any scale. For example, the improvement of sustainable electrical vehicles in the mobility system would require also corresponding upgrading of infrastructure and the change of policies [1]. In a broad sense, the socio-technical system is composed of immense amount of elements and factors.

In this chapter, the mobility situation on Texel island will be analyzed as a socio-technical system. Besides, the vision for a more sustainable mobility system will be included in the discussion. Thereby, technological innovations shall be considered as part of the social discourse, including two groups of users which are the locals on the island and the tourists coming for holidays. Then, the existing sustainable projects that have been carried out for Texel’s mobility system will be discussed and evaluated. Finally, the chapter will include the vision for a better sustainable solution in a longer period, also, challenges and problems for this transitioning process will be stated as a conclusion to this chapter.

[1] Borrás, S., & Edler, J. (2014). The Governance of Socio-technical Systems. Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.