Know-How Enhancement for Sustainable transportation organisation

The recent terrible earthquake that hit the territory of L’Aquila, capital of region and situated in the inner part of Abruzzo, forced more than 40.000 people to leave their houses, move to the coast and travel every day from and to the town. The huge and sudden increase of cars along the communication roads with an unsustainable burden on the environment and enormous uneasiness on people, induced the local governments, first of all the Region, to afford the emergency of rapidly reorganising the public transportation network, through provisions, laws and directives following national decrees and decisions. A good organisation of these services became a key factor for the start up of the town reconstruction, not only of its physical structures but especially of its social, cultural and economical identity. After the emergency indeed, the accessibility to L’Aquila from other areas of the region able to guarantee a systematic mobility for students and workers is the fundamental support for the people who are waiting for the definitive re-settlement in their town and in particular for the great number of university students who lost their temporarily residence. The IPA space includes areas where a public transportation system has reached a good degree of efficiency but also marginal areas (in the new EU members and in Candidate or Potential Candidate Countries) where the transportation system is not efficient, and governments have to work in order to assure development and cohesion, quality of life for citizens and pollution reduction. These actors and policy makers need to develop competences and know-how in order to find out solutions able to improve accessibility on the local level and set up the basis for the creation of an integrated suitable accessibility system able to facilitate movements (of people and goods) between different regions and enhance the attractiveness of the IPA space. The experience made by Region Abruzzo in the emergency due to the earthquake, developed competences and know-how easily transferable to other areas through pilot actions well targeted and tailored on the different territories involved by the partnership. Thus the general objective of the project is the enhancement of competence and know-how of policy makers and local actors for the improvement of accessibility of marginal areas and the contribution to the achievement of Gothenburg/Lisbon strategy. The specific objectives are: - to increase the use of public transportation - to decrease the burden on the environment - to reduce the isolation and the feeling of abandon in people living in marginal areas - to reduce the depopulation of areas where isolation prevents the full exploitation of their potentialities - to enhance the social cohesion - to carry out pilot actions showing different possibilities of application in the transport systems of the tools developed as examples for policy makers. The project activities foresee: - a preliminary analysis of the territories in terms of resources and transport systems and people needs, identification of bottlenecks and of opportunities, - realization of a ICT tools (software) for the management of the collected data and the specific needs of the customers - implementation of the pilot actions representing 3 fundamental territorial needs and experimentation of the tools and methodologies - training of PPs on the developed tools - specific training of local actors/policy makers. The project main outputs will be: - creation of strategies/tools for the correct collection and use of data related to needs and opportunities, - competence and know-how enhancement of policy makers and local actors for the wise management of local transportation responding to the real customers’ needs - creation of a network of marginal areas able to apply the methodologies/tools for the improvement of accessibility - increase of public transportation use