Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PORTIS (PORT-Cities: Integrating Sustainability)
Période du rapport: 2019-09-01 au 2020-11-30
CIVITAS PORTIS is an Innovation Action (IA) financed by INEA under the H2020 Framework Programme. Its key objective is to try out and assess the efficacy of innovative sustainable mobility measures that address the problems of port cities across Europe. These solutions are demonstrated in five major port cities located on the four seas of Europe: Aberdeen, Antwerp (North Sea), Trieste (Mediterranean Sea), Constanta (Black Sea) and Klaipeda (Baltic Sea). The project also involves an international follower port city on the East China Sea (Ningbo).
PORTIS has established living laboratories in each of these cities to test 49 innovative mobility solutions ranging from newly-emerging technologies to policy-based and soft measures. The living laboratories focus on four areas: governance, people, transport systems, and goods. Most of the measures employ common approaches that are reinforced by four specific objectives: to generate and build innovation through collaboration across cities; to gather quantitative and qualitative evidence of the effectiveness of these measures; to transfer these innovations to port cities and marketplaces across Europe and beyond; and to ensure that the project’s results are accessible and expand the European knowledge base on the effectiveness and impacts of innovative mobility solutions.
The project has also devised the CIVITAS PORTIS Innovation Process, created electronic innovation brochures, and established the Thematic Innovation Platform (WP5). Moreover, evaluation activities have been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the PORTIS measures in terms of impacts and process (WP6). Actions to understand the potential market for CIVITAS PORTIS innovations have been finalised and the transferability potential of local measures has been assessed and disseminated for the benefit of port cities across Europe and beyond. Exchanges with EU cities, China and third countries have been enhanced via webinars, training sessions and workshops (WP7). Regarding the project’s visibility, the cities have set up their national websites and have used their selected ambassadors to increase citizen engagement and promote sustainable mobility. PORTIS days have been held in all cities over the years. A successful final conference was jointly organised with the other CIVITAS IAs with a remarkable attendance of participants (WP8). The Policy Group met annually all along the project lifetime and discussed mobility themes of common interest (WP9).
Significant impacts have been realised across the project, both in terms of planning processes, particularly related to collaboration and communication between cities and their ports, for example, facilitated by Constanta’s Mobility Forum, and in direct impacts in areas such as modal share. Currently realised impacts include Antwerp’s 28% increase in cycling in the city, with an increase from 10% to 16% by Port commuters. Aberdeen has seen an 11% increase of freight movements travelling on principal routes instead of on minor or residential roads, while Klaipeda has seen a 7.5% decrease in CO2 emissions in city/port interaction zone and Trieste has significantly increased its pedestrian infrastructure in proximity to the old Port. A note is that due to the timing of measure implementation in some cases, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the full impacts of these measures will be more directly measurable over the coming years.