Report: Policies, Projects & best Practices
The European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) flagship project INTERCONNECT addresses the challenge of curbing the car-reliant mobility trend in the South Baltic (SB) are through user-adjusted and more sustainable public transport services for regional and cross- border travels. The current public transport offer hardly meets customer expectations for easines and attractiveness of regional and cross-border journeys, with scarce range of integrated ticket options for multimodal rides, difficult access to one-spot passenger information and no clear benefits for users when choosing the public transport over car.
To enhance car-independent mobility in the SB area the partnership consisting of 9 project partners and 10 associated partners from 6 countries will carry out joint capacity-building, pilot demonstration and advocacy actions. These will tackle three dimensions of public transport in serving regional and cross-border travels – the demand, the supply and the governance.
This report represents the first deliverable (3.1, “Policy and user response to public transport services”) of Work Package 3 which is focused on a collection of evidence, knowledge and experience through the screening of policy and user response to public transport services by collecting and analysing policy documents (relevant for the project area), good practices and projects.
To ensure the regional relevance in gathering the data, the HIE-RO at the University of Rostock as the leading organisation of WP 3 has involved the project partners in the development of the report’s structure and in presenting relevant policies on public transport to be taken into consideration in the next analytical steps. Apart from that, all institutions involved in the project contributed to the analysis and selection of the good practices to create a document tailor-made for the partners’ area.
The chapter on transport policies then provides an overview on the most important legal and strategic frameworks that have been divided into two groups of policy documents. First, a focus is set on the EU policy level consisting of: The general policy on transport as it is described by the European Commission in the White Paper from 2011 and the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region.
Second, the most relevant regional or local policies relevant for the project’s geographical area are presented. To ensure certain level of pertinence, the INTERCONNECT project partners contributed to the report by selecting the policy documents and their content taking into consideration the specific character of their region and defined expectations to the project results. Thus, the chosen content information reflects the specific perspective of the project partners, their point of view including national, regional and local/city level policies on e.g. public transport itself or regional development with components relevant for the future of public transport.
The two chapters on projects and good practices aim at showing information on past or ongoing EU projects on public transport in the SB or other Interreg programme areas that have been selected jointly by the INTERCONNECT project partners. The EU-project part is rather focussed on the project work itself. More practical examples with a focus on results and lessons learned are described in the chapter “Good Practice Examples”.
Read more on https://drive.google.com/file/d/1umgebBxYwdbtHg-6G6RtDO02wAGVco0L/view