Enhancing Multimodal Platforms, Inland waterways and Railways services Integration in Central Europe
The Northern Adriatic region, going clockwise from Rijeka/Koper to the Emilia Romagna region coast represents the Southern terminal of the Adriatic Baltic transport corridor. The relevance of this corridor increased in the last years because of the economic growth of the Central European regions and with this connected continuous increase in transport demand. However the transport supply has been mainly generated by road as the multimodal transport solutions were not able to satisfy this increasing demand, due to the lack of adequate infrastructures (especially railways) and competitive services to reach these new markets. This consequently had a negative impact on environment and transport sustainability. Moreover, the Adriatic ports lost part of their competitive ground, being the closer point that the freight flows going to the Central Europe area could reach by sea.

This has encouraged partners along the corridor to start working together with the aim of raising the awareness and attracting the attention of policy makers on the need of improving the infrastructural network in this region and providing more efficient multimodal services. Starting from this point, the EMPIRIC project aims at providing transport operators and multimodal logistics service providers with instruments and the framework conditions to support the investments in new multimodal services for the programme area. In particular, the project will contribute to the preparation of investments and the definition of common tools to enhance the attractiveness of multimodal transport services and infrastructures linking these regions. Given the economic ties and also the scale of the area the local approach is not adequate to provide satisfactory solutions to these issues and therefore the transnational approach has been adopted.