cities.multimodal news and announcements

cities.multimodal has come to and end after three and a half years of intense cooperation. The project partners would like to thank everyone who has been following and supporting the project.

As a final remark we would like to remind you of our publications, all citizen involvement and peer review reports along with fact sheets, newsletters and final publications can be found on the publication page. 

Vilnius city’s Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) has an overall target to change the current modal split to a more sustainable one by 2030. The aim is to have the share of trips of about 1/3 by private cars, 1/3 by public transport and 1/3 on foot, where the rest (about 7.5 percent) would be filled with trips by bicycles and other micromobility modes.

Last week we had our last session of the cities.multimodal webinar series - about 100 mobility practitioners, city representatives and interested persons joined us in four session since December 2020! We heard practical experiences and good practices from our partner cities and expert partners, had insightful panel discussions and presented all our achievements and results of the past 3,5 years of our INTERREG project.

You find all recordings and materials on our sessions here:

How can we transform our urban areas from car-dominated spaces to spaces for people? Can we support the citizens´ change of mobility behaviours by providing multimodal infrastructure and options? And how can we together with our citizens, create a city space for all? These were the leading questions for the cities.multimodal project, including 10 cities around the Baltic Sea as well as numerous expert partners.

The Riga Municipal Agency “Riga Energy Agency” has launched the first mobility point in Riga and Latvia in the VEF district, connecting different sustainable modes of transport and offering convenient access to micro mobility and public transport opportunities. The mobility point will also serve as a pilot area for deployment of innovative, data-based solutions, with both a bicycle and pedestrian counter and a testbed for smart city solutions.

The Baltic Sea Region Mobility Summit 2020 will take place on September 8-10, 2020. This three-day online joint mobility conference is hosted by cities.multimodal and two other projects funded by Interreg BSR: BSR electric and SUMBA.

On the 15^th of May, Kalmar opened its first mobility point. The municipality has built a bicycle garage conveniently located next to the central station, which is the main hub for buses and trains in and out of the city. By installing the bicycle garage, Kalmar hopes to facilitate the possibility to combine sustainable ways of mobility.

Rostock took a big step towards multimodality. On Monday, 11th May, the city inaugurated the first three mobility points, combining car-sharing and cargo bike-sharing.

Many daily target points were closed in Vilnius for more than a month due to the coronavirus quarantine. For example, public and educational institutions as well as businesses organized a remote regime for employees and pupils, people were generally advised to stay home, and so they did.

The smooth and safe movement of public transport was ensured during the whole quarantine in Vilnius. This service did not stop in the city for a moment, only night buses were cancelled. Passenger flows were closely monitored daily. Compared to  volume of people movement before quarantine, the flows during quarantine decreased by 65-78 percent. The good news is that as quarantine eases, flows have already increased by 11 percent.

Due to the current circumstances, the 5^th cities.multimodal project meeting that originally would have taken place in Tartu and Pskov was transformed into a virtual two-day project meeting held during 22nd and 23d of April. The main venue of the online meeting was a meeting room created on the Jitsi platform. Despite not meeting in person the cities.multimodal consortium took part in different sessions using a variety of tools and methods.

We are delighted to share the first ever episode of the Interreg podcast "This is Europe" featuring cities.multimodal's lead partner the Hanseatic City of Rostock.

cities.multimodal represented by Lisa Wiechmann and Steffen Nozon from the City of Rostock recently contributed to the making of an Interreg podcast. The podcast features three different Interreg projects dealing with sustainabiltiy. In the making of the podcast the production team and the lead partners biked around in Rostock and in the pilot area Kröperliner-Tor-Vorstadt. The podcast content for cities.multimodal's part is about mobility in BSR cities and Rostock as well as project activities such as the Living Streets campaign.

Claus Köllinger from Graz, Austria is an urban transport and mobility management expert representing the Urban Mobility Observatory Eltis.

In the frame of cities.mutlimodal, the City of Rostock cooperated with the municipal housing association, which goes by the name WIRO. The aim of the cooperation was to develop a mobility concept for the new housing area “Wohnen am Werftdreieck”, that WIRO is aiming to build from 2021 onwards. The housing area contains around 750 apartments and is perfectly located in the city center of Rostock, close to the river Warnow.

As an opening of the European Mobility Week (EMW) in September 2019, Vilnius invited its residents and guests to use and explore various means of transport. The ceremony was called „City hike: car, I’m sorry”  (#AtleiskAutomobili!). For the first time, people travelling by bikes, scooters, skateboards, walking, etc. (🚌🚲🚶‍♀️🛴🚶‍♂️🚎) travelled from different sites of the city and gathered in one place – a square by the Parliament building.

To ensure that kids arrive to school safely, many parents drive their children to school. These so called ‘parent taxis’ not only have various negative effects on the children’s’ development, they also increase traffic jams and make the situation worse and even dangerous for children walking and cycling to school. The school in Ellerbek, Germany is affected by this problem, facing dangerous parent taxi maneuvering in front of the school daily.

The City of Tartu has organized a sort of a revolution in its public transportation system. The beginning of June 2019 brought the opening of the first bike-sharing system in Estonia and the first electric bike-sharing system of the Baltic States. In the end of June, the introduction of new buses and bus lines were introduced, they had been in the making for around 3 years.

The second train-the-trainer workshop took place in October 2019 and was organized in Vilnius in connection to the fourth project meeting. Just like the first workshop, the second was organized by the UBC in cooperation with Claus Köllinger from the Eltis consortium. The first workshop was held in Spring 2019 and covered the theme ‘behavioural change as an enabler for sustainable mobility’, you can read more about it here.