SYNAPTIC
On 12 May 2009 at the BAPTS Launch Event in Bielefeld, Germany, BAPTS and two further public transport projects from the North West Europe (NWE) programme signed a “Joint Declaration for Sustainable Mobility”. These three projects, BAPTS, ROCK and ICMA agreed that they would work together to promote the vision of effective and well-connected public transport within NWE and to cooperate with other projects and initiatives. With SINTROPHER, a further NWE project, a cluster partnership has been formulated to this effect. The four projects together encompass a complete chain of sustainable door-to-door mobility.
Specific objective:
Predictable and efficient door-to-door journeys are extremely important to passengers. Passengers do not tend to focus on the individual parts of a trip, but instead on the whole journey experience. What they want is a seamless and predictable journey without experiencing barriers and unnecessary delays when changing between types of public transport or between operators, and increasingly, when crossing national borders.
Door-to-door travel can be cost effective, is an integral part of an overall transport mix, does respond to increasing public expectations of what public services should deliver, and can help to ensure modal shift where connections to a wider public transport network can be achieved. Indeed, the success of door to door solutions, from the taxi market to the provision of cycling links, as well as the increasing range of booked and scheduled demand responsive transport services, confirms this as an area of growth.
In line with this, and also based on the participating project partners’ expertise and experience, as well as the provisions of related policy documents, the specific objective of the strategic cluster is to enhance the framework conditions for and promote the development of seamless and integrated mobility networks to facilitate door-to-door journeys by public transport (PT) in NWE in the present and next programming period.
This objective builds on the strategic policy objectives for sustainable transport outlined in ‘A sustainable future for transport – towards an integrated, technology-led and user-friendly system’ adopted by the Commission on 17 June 2009, as COM (2009) 279.
Expected achievements:
Based on the expertise of the participating projects and the intensive dialogue with relevant stakeholders during the cluster implementation, the cluster consortium expects to set up NWE Master Plan for seamless sustainable mobility with policy recommendations, describing as concrete imagery as possible of how seamless and integrated networks would look and work. Also, from this Master Plan, concrete project ideas will be generated, later to be funded through available financing instruments.
Cluster cooperation intends to impact the content development of the connectivity priority of the upcoming Operational Programme so that in the next programming period there will be a framework for projects that really make mobility chains as seamless as possible, from air travel to walking, creating a network of hubs and connections, on all levels of scale.
Partnership:
The project is implemented with the participation of the following ongoing North West Europe accessibility projects, altogether with the active support of 44 partner organisations:
Budget: This strategic project is financed through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), in the frame of the North West Europe programme. The total budget is € 574 970.
Duration: 10 September 2010 – 30 June 2013
Services of Grants Europe: project development, management of the application process, elaboration of the application documentation in English