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.

2019 has been the year of multimodality in Aarhus. In the pilot area, two mobility points have been constructed and the citizens are eager to start using them. The mobility points are amongst the measures implemented in Aarhus in 2019 that will improve the conditions for living in the city centre without a car. In April, The City of Aarhus made an agreement with a Swedish e-scooter company on a provision of 150 e-scooters in a shared scheme.

In early 2019 Gdansk, the number one city for cycling in Poland, launched their Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) in English (PDF). With its geographical position the city is an important node in the Polish transport system, the city has developed harbor and airport connections and a highly developed transport infrastructure. However, prerequisites for the urban mobility where in need of an improvement.

This year´s CIVITAS Forum was held in Graz, Austria from October 2-4 2019 and it was the biggest one in it´s history! Over 600 participants from all over Europe and beyond took part in 3 days filled with presentations, sessions, discussions and networking. The cities.multimodal project was represented together with BSReletric and SUMBA at a stand to showcase the experiences from the Baltic Sea Region.

Autumn is approaching and so it's time for the 17th EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK organized all over Europe from 16th-22nd of September. The EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK is a campaign promoting sustainable mobility options to the general population, the theme for 2019 is safe walking and cycling. The campaign is originally an initiative of the European Commission - Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport.

During fall 2019 three peer reviews will take place in the partner cities Riga, Gdansk and Vilnius. More information about peer reviews can be found here.

The report by the German Federal Statistical Office clearly reveals that pupils and kinds are not safe on their way to school and kindergarten. One reason are the so-called "parent taxis". In order to ensure that their kids arrive at schools and kindergarten safely, they bring them by car. Considering statistics about children as a car passenger in accidents, driving the kids is only an alleged feeling of safety. Particularly the increase  of cars in front of schools and kindergartens makes the situation even worse for those kids still walking or cycling.

Within our project, the 10 city partners plan and implement a variety of different measures and activities – locally. But we would not be a project, founded by the Baltic Sea region programme, if not the aspect of cross-border...

“Welcome to the first cities.multimodal talkshow and these are our guests today…”!
Discussions about how mobility points can solve the challenges in sustainable mobility, panelists explaining how they work in MPs and a  (quite) critical audience to convince!
This setting took place in the first cities.multimodal train-the-trainer workshop, in connection with the 3^rd project meeting in Aarhus!

From 16^th – 17^th May 2019 our project partners and their local traffic planners were travelling to the Hanseatic Cities Bremen and Hamburg to learn from the cities’ experiences on how to plan and build mobility points. Today both cities have a dense network of these hubs and gave great advice on integrated mobility offers, location finding and communication strategies.

The cities.multimodal project consortium met in Aarhus, the second largest city of Denmark, for their third project meeting in mid-April. On the previous evening we got together at the Aarhus Street Food area, where we could taste all kind of different foods from all over the world and which is located in a very interesting venue.
On the next day we travelled out of the center to the meeting venue – the department for Technic and Environment is located in a very modern building directly in one of the recent developing areas of Aarhus.

IT solutions for travel planning like e.g. apps and websites that assist citizens and travellers in planning their journeys are important for encouraging multimodality.

The research for travel related IT-solutions in the project, conducted by the Institute of Baltic Studies (IBS) is based on three models for data collection. Firstly, a desk research has been conducted to map existing travel planning solutions elsewhere in Europe. The desk research provided an understanding of which kind of solutions that already exist and are technically possible to develop.

Charging cars without any CO2 emissions is now possible in the municipality of Karlskrona thanks to the hybrid powerplant ’Energiraffen’! The powerplant which can be found in the harbor area is not only for e-cars, other electrical vehicles such as e-bikes can also be charged. The generated energy will for example be used for charging the municipality’s own e-cars.

During two intensive days in Aarhus, Denmark the cities.multimodal project partners gathered for both the third project meeting and a training session. The training was facilitated in cooperation with Claus Köllinger from the urban mobility observatory ELTIS.

What are the success factors for well functioning mobility points and what kind of an impact does a mobility point have in increasing multimodality. These questions are investigated and answered in Renita Pais' master's thesis, in which the cities.multimodal partner cities Rostock, Vilnius and Pskov act as targets for the scope.

“It was a great, productive and positive experience to have you here and I am very happy for the respectful sharing of ideas we had. This is very positive for Kalmar” summarizes Robert Dahlstöm, project manager,  the first cities.multimodal peer review in Kalmar on Januar 17th 2019.

To reach the climate targets private car traffic must be reduced. A municipal travelling habit survey made by the Swedish Association of Green Motorists (Gröna Bilister) shows that car dependency can be reduced in medium-sized cities and commuter towns.

From 15-17th of October the cities.multimodal consortium gathered for the 2nd partner meeting in the capital of Latvia, Riga. We spent 1,5 days of intensive work on diferent activities, with  discussions, brainstorming, creative writing excercises and planning for the upcoming 2 years.

Mr Angelo Meulemann from the SHARE-North project joined us for an inspirational presentation about the mobihubs concept and provided inut for further discussion on our planned mobility points in the project.

The City of Gdansk has recently launched two pedestrian counters as a part of the cities.multimodal project. The counters have appeared in two main city districts located in the pilot area, namely Wrzeszcz and City Centre. Thanks to the temperature recognition technology, the results achieved will enable urban decision-making and planning processes even more pedestrian-friendly. There is no doubt that being easily portable from one spot to another around the city makes them unique and highly useful, e.g. for Living Streets campaigns or temporary road pedestrianization.

Riga has set a goal to achieve the status of the Smart City by integrating cross-sectorial innovations into transportation, housing, energy and public administration. Also, the “Sustainable Development Strategy of Riga-2030” sets our ambition “to become an internationally recognisable metropolis with high quality of life, innovative economy, smart and efficient management of the resources, modern administration and active participation of city residents”.

The City of Aarhus, like many other European cities is growing. In 2030, it is estimated around 50,000 people will have been added to the current population of 325,000 a growth of more than 10 %. 30,000 more jobs will move to the city and approximately 20,000 more cars if there are no changes to the mobility patterns.

The vehicle-to-population ratio growth in Russia has led to a number of downsides associated with the expanding use of personal vehicles: rising traffic congestion, emissions of pollutants, road traffic accidents and travel time losses. In many Russian cities, people in practice don’t use public transport because of its poor reliability, large headways and poor quality of services, uncomfortable routes orsimply, because it is not available!

The Polish Union of Active Mobility (PUMA) carried out a promotion and educational campaign in the field of mobility management named “Mobility Kindergartens – Active Kids”. As a part of the campaign 13 kindergartens received kick scooters for kids. The kick scooters are available for rental and for commuting to and from the kindergarten.

The goals of the campaign are to:

As a result of the data gathering in the preparatory analysis, the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) prepared fact sheets for each city.

As the motto for 2018's European Mobility Week “mix and move” fits perfectly with the goals for cities.multimodal Gdansk could not miss such a fantastic chance to promote switching from cars...

Cities.multimodal was presented at the UBC Sustainable Cities Commission meeting held in Klaipeda, Lithuania 13-14^th of September. The topic of the meeting was Sustainable Urban Mobility - “Trends and challenges in the Baltic Sea Region”.

Mobility professionals in Copenhagen and Malmö introduced strategies on how to benefit from urban planning when creating mobility solutions and on how to create a dialogue with citizens when remaking public spaces.

“A couple of years ago Vilnius started to implement a Park & Ride system and at the same time our Sustainable urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) was initiated. The idea in the cities.multimodal project, to implement a mobility hub– that was a new issue, a pioneering project, which can be shown to our key decision makers, specialists and communities!

How can we increase multimodality and how can we implement smart mobility management in the cities.multimodal partner cities? The first step of the answer on this question certainly is: Let’s have a closer look at the situations regarding these central elements of sustainable urban mobility. This would build a basis for developing measures tailored to the specific conditions and challenges of the cities.

“Kalmar is working actively with urban mobility topics as a result of the ample changes and expansion that the town is currently undergoing due to a brand new university campus that is being erected in the city centre. Soon several thousand students and staff will be added to the present flow of daily commuters, so there is an imminent need for integrated planning and strategies that develop the town in a sustainable and attractive way. This entails securing the awareness and acceptance of inhabitants, employers and business owners.

The first regular project meeting for cities.multimodal was held in April 25-26 2018 in Turku in the former shipyard-now-museum Forum Marinum. Besides the project management discussions, the partners worked in different workshops on their planned activities, a "market of methods" introduced citizen involvement methods that the cities are about to test during the project lifetime. Apart from the intensive work, the partners also had enough time to network during the evening programme and the site visit at the end of the meeting.

On november 23-24 2017 17 partners kicked-off the cities.multimodal project in Rostock together. With the Hanseatic city as the lead partner, the consortium will work for 3 years towards a change in urban mobility - shifting from focusing on individual private car use to more sustainable, mulltimodal options to move around the city.