Ivo Cré’s scientific contributions

NODES “New tOols for Design and OpEration of Urban Transport InterchangeS” is a collaborative project co-funded by the Seventh Framework Programme focused on building and testing a Toolbox to support European cities in the design and operation of new or upgraded urban transport interchanges. NODES thereby provides greater support, services and satisfaction to travellers and users, to interchange operators as well as those societal and economic actors depending on the efficiency of the interchange. NODES provides a helping hand for European cities striving for inclusive, multimodal and sustainable urban transport. NODES is able to supply solutions and methods for Local Authorities, Public Transport operators as well as interchange promoters to better and more effectively plan, design and manage multimodal transport interchanges in European cities and beyond. NODES uses an integrated approach balancing and integrating land use and transport planning, interchange design, intermodality and Information Communication Technologies (ICT), interchange management and business models, energy and environment issues.

NICHES+ was a FP7 coordination action funded by DG Research. The project aimed at stimulating a wide debate on innovative urban transport and mobility between relevant stakeholders from different sectors and disciplines across the EU and accession countries, in order to promote the most promising new concepts, initiatives and projects from their current "niche" position to a "mainstream" urban transport policy application. The project explored 4 thematic areas: accessibility, efficiency of infrastructure and interchanges, traffic management centres, and automated and space efficient transport systems, embedded in an advanced spatial setting. In each of these areas, three innovative concepts were examined. The project elaborated real life implementation scenarios directly with local and regional authorities for the integration of one or more innovative concepts in existing urban transport policies. 6 Champion Cities were selected (Daventry - UK, Artois-Gohelle - FR, Worcestershire - UK, Cork - IE, Trondheim - NO and Burgos - ES). As key results, the project matched the selected champion cities with suitable NICHES+ concepts that could be implemented at the specific sites; conducted a transferability analysis between donor cities that already had experience with the implementation of an innovative concept and the NICHES+ Champion Cities; developed - in cooperation with selected stakeholders in the Champion Cities - concrete implementation plans for the uptake of innovative concepts; encouraged the use of innovative planning and financing strategies in the implementation by providing tailored recommendations on these aspects. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of the Programme, Committee of the Transport Research Arena 2012

Building on the conclusions of the MATISSE report, the ECLIPSE project has worked to establish partnerships between stakeholders that are relevant to the issue of transport and social exclusion. The stakeholders are situated at various levels: The European level, the national level and the regional to local level. This document describes the process of the establishment of these three levels. For each level we describe the nature of the stakeholder and their role and function in the partnership. At the local level, RATB and Merseytravel describe the partnerships within their field of operation. At the level above, Polis has identified local experts within their membership that are dedicated to finding solutions for social exclusion through transport planning. The third section provides an introduction to the contacts of the National Action Plan Officials. The fourth section of the document maps the different EU stakeholder organisations and institutions in the field of transport and social inclusion. The document concludes with recommendations for involving different stakeholder groups in the transport and social inclusion process and a section on financing the policy integration.