Transport systems’ significant contribution to CO2 emissions in the energy sector, highlights the urgent need for Europe to develop solutions that simultaneously reduce these emissions and improve transportation accessibility. The European Commission has recognised this challenge and introduced multiple strategies and policies to tackle this issue. Urban public transport (PT) offers numerous benefits, such as promoting sustainability, enhancing accessibility, affordability, and reducing pollution, congestion, and noise. Despite these advantages, public transport is frequently disregarded, and it faces negative perceptions and underutilisation, particularly among vulnerable groups.
SPINE project aims to expedite the transition to climate-neutral urban mobility by enhancing public transport systems with smart and integrated solutions. By focusing on new mobility services, active modes, micromobility, connected/automated mobility and sharing schemes seeks to improve equity, quality of life and access to PT.
To support this, a network of collaborative Living Labs (LLs) is established in 11 cities, where technological and non-technological innovations will be tested and implemented. A core component of SPINE is its equity design thinking approach, where co-creation plays a central role and the engagement of various stakeholders will be used to evaluate and further develop the proposed measures.
The four Lead cities include Antwerp, Bologna, Tallinn, and Las Palmas. The seven Twinning cities include Barreiro, Valladolid, Zilina, Sibenik, Heraklion, Gdynia and Rouen. These living labs incorporate diverse user perspectives and focus on developing transferable strategies. Furthermore, digital tools and data models will assist in the testing and selecting the best strategies to achieve SPINE’s goals.
The two main goals of the project are the increase in PT modal share and the increase in PT user satisfaction. To measure the project’s impact, an Impact Assessment and Continuous evaluation framework will be developed. This framework will start by evaluating the existing landscape and initial basket of solutions and detailing the baseline, benchmarks and assumptions for measuring the impact of the services. It will also provide guidelines for data collection to calculate and compare the KPIs.
The project’s vision is to enhance the current systems of the cities, evaluate them and apply the identified successful approaches to other cities. A key strategy includes the combination of technological innovation with a strong focus on user needs and societal impact. The integration of social sciences is crucial to the SPINE project. This interdisciplinary approach ensures that the solutions developed are not only technologically sound but also socially inclusive and culturally sensitive. To this end, SPINE will explore behavioral models (simulations), rebranding PT campaigns to raise awareness, an online digital bulletin board (forum) to facilitate open dialogue and exchanges, diffuse policy recommendations, lessons learned and training short courses.
