With regard to transportation and mobility, the quantification of energy efficiency potentials of modal shifts and reduced transport volumes by changed and reduced movement of goods and persons requires a likewise quantitative database of current geographical properties of settlements and their spatial relationships... Based on the approach of Urban Morphological Zones, a novel method was devised, which delineates individual settlements. From small villages to large metropolitan areas, a total number of about 150,000 urban areas were mapped across Europe... Moreover, these so-called Urban Areas were enriched with attributes containing population, population densities, topographical properties such as slope, and climatic variables such as temperature and precipitation. Several among these aspects are thought to describe quantitatively the context which influences the relevance and the impact of policy measures and spatial solutions for energy efficiency improvements in the transport sector. Urban Areas were characterised by their population size, and grouped in five classes, for the definition of a hierarchy between these Urban Areas. For the assessment of energy efficiency potentials regarding the transport volumes in inter-urban transportation between settlements, the distances from each Urban Area to its nearest higher-order settlements were calculated. In this way, hierarchical relationships were established for all Urban Areas, so that for each settlement, smaller and larger neighbour settlements and their proximity are known. For studies on urban transport, intra-urban distances were modelled by means of population weighted distances from populated areas to the identified urban centres. For the analysis of temporal developments of urban mobility, data for the years 1990, 2000 and 2015 were generated, which include population, populated area as well as intra-urban distances for all Urban Areas. The resulting dataset will allow transport studies within the sEEnergies project at an extraordinary geographical scale and with a very detailed data base of Urban Areas, and their connections within a European transport system. © 2020 sEEnergies