Rail Hub Cities for South East Europe
The challenge that the RAIL4SEE partners share is the development of models, concepts, measures, harmonised strategies and policy actions targeted to the improvement of rail and intermodal transport in SEE. In particular partners call for complementary interventions facing the alleviation of barriers for rail hubs integration in the local, regional, transnational and TEN-T systems, transport services projecting & harmonisation, governance improvement, in particular in the transversal perspective of Public Transport Partnerships development, meant as operational agreements for a seamless provision of transport services & information to SEE citizens. RAIL4SEE answers the need for improved transnational rail connectivity in SEE by IT, governance, services & organization measures. It addresses non-infrastructural interventions aimed at integrating cities into transnational transport corridors and it works on the transnational transport backbone of SEE by involving 11 rail hubs and 11 TEN-T & PAN EU corridors. In this perspective RAIL4SEE will enhance rail transport by improving the feeding functions on rail of major hub-cities & of their respective regions and metropolitan contexts, integrate the primary & secondary transport networks via rail hubs, develop functional integration and multimodal cooperation among transport hubs. The RAIL4SEE activities are oriented to the long term sustainability of the project results from a political, financial and operational point of view, as the project directly involves the core decision makers in rail and public transport in SEE, that is to say policy makers and transport operators. In this sense the main visible outcomes are policy & investments improvements, pilot actions on integrated ticketing & information systems for transport users, the set up of regional & transnational cooperation platforms and improved rail services in SEE.