SMART COMMUTING

Functional Urban Areas (FUA) involved in SMART COMMUTING, are territorial contexts situated in coastal and internal areas of Central Europe, in which every day current unsustainable mobility model materialize itself in rush hours through congested roads, air pollution, CO2 emissions, noise, accidents.

It is due to various reasons: urban sprawl instead of compact cities, work time schedule, inadequate intermodal systems, poor railway infrastructure (in Slovenia). All this, combined with cultural habits and bad sedentary lifestyle, has led to thousands of commuters using daily cars instead of more sustainable means.

To change this situation, SMART COMMUTING will foster coordination structure at FUA level by involving municipalities of surrounding territories, Public Transport companies, etc. to achieve sustainable planning at this challenging upper level and will promote also a more internal coordination within municipalities (still largely missing).

Various joint actions - SWOT analysis, institutional platform at FUA level, training and capacity building process, pilot actions - will support the expected change, consisting of enhancement of public sector's capacity of sustainable mobility planning and implementing, combined with some immediate solutions to make involved FUAs more liveable, free-carbon and attractive.

The transnational project context - a sort of transnational result-oriented learning process - will enable each PP to learn from pitfalls, drawback and barriers as well as from successful ideas of other cities and countries, and also to learn how solutions work in different cultural contexts.

The official start of the project was on 01.06.2017 and will last until the end of May 2020. Lead Project Partner is Municipality of Rimini, followed by a consortium of additional 9 project partners from 6 EU countries (Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Austria and Czech Republic).

The SMART COMMUTING project is financed by the European Union funding programme Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE. The total project budget is 1.555.337 EUR. Municipality of Velenje as project partner will manage the amount of 167.029 EUR, from which 85% are co-financed by the EU and 15% by the Municipality of Velenje.

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Additional information about the Program

The Interreg Program was launched in 1990 as a cornerstone of the EU Cohesion Policy. The Program provides a framework for the implementation of collective actions and policy exchanges between actors in different Member States. In the past years, the Interreg has evolved and expanded, especially its budget and focus, and currently, comprehends three different types of programs: cross-border, transnational and interregional. For the programing period, 2014-2020, a total budget of 10.1 billion € is foreseen and the investment priorities range from research and innovation, information and communication technologies, competitiveness of SMEs, to low-carbon economy, combating climate change, environment and resource efficiency, sustainable transport, employment and mobility, social inclusion, education and training and better public administration.

The Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE has an available budget of 246 million € and it is part of the Interreg Transnational Cooperation Program with a total budget 2.1 billion €. Its geographical scope comprehends Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The Program’s funding priorities are innovation to increase competitiveness, low carbon strategies, natural and cultural resources for sustainable growth and transport for better connection.