The first stakeholder meeting for the Shift2Rail IP4 RIDE2RAIL project was held virtually on 2 February. More than 110 participants from 30 countries across the European railway community and beyond participated in the event, obtaining insight into the project, interacting with speakers and learning about multimodal door-to-door mobility strategies.
RIDE2RAIL (travel companion enhancements and ride-sharing services synchronised to rail and public transport) is a three million euro collaborative R&D project funded by Shift2Rail within the Horizon 2020 programme. The 30-month project is coordinated by UITP (International Association of Public Transport) and will run until May 2022. The project consortium consists of 17 partners from ten European countries.
RIDE2RAIL’s overall objective is to develop an innovative framework for intelligent mobility, facilitating the efficient combination of flexible (ride-sharing) and scheduled transport services (rail, bus, and other public transport services), thus enhancing the performance of the overall mobility system and reducing single car occupancy and all related negative externalities, such as congestion, emissions, and accidents.
RIDE2RAIL aims to promote ride-sharing as a “feeder”, complementary to the public transport network, improving mobility in urban areas and between urban and rural areas. In this context, the project will develop functionalities to be integrated with the S2R Travel Companion and will test them in four European locations.
The event was opened by Marc Guigon, Director of the UIC Passenger Department, who welcomed the participants and presented UIC’s activities as well as the 2021 EU Year of Rail, which will be an outstanding event for all European citizens. His introductory speech was followed by a presentation from Yves Perreal of the Shift2Rail IP4 Innovation Programme: IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services.
Project Coordinator Giuseppe Rizzi of UITP then provided an overview of the RIDE2RAIL project, its vision and objectives and planned impact. He also presented the work completed in the first 14 months of the project, as well as the next steps.
The workshop also provided participants with an opportunity to learn more about railway initiatives dedicated to MaaS (Mobility as a Service) and door-to-door mobility. There were presentations from Rahel Kaenel of SBB, who presented the “Yumuv” MaaS initiative in Switzerland, and Renzo Iorio of NUGO, an app allowing people to easily plan their door-to-door journeys.
Next up was Cristian Consonni of EURECAT, who provided a detailed overview of technological developments within RIDE2RAIL (offer categoriser/ranker, crowd-based TSP, agreement ledger). These functionalities will be integrated in the enhanced S2R Travel Companion. The project will also deliver a Driver Companion in the next few months.
Finally, Carlo Vaghi of FIT Consulting introduced demo activities at the four RIDE2RAIL demo sites. The objectives and preliminary results from the sites (Padua, Brno, Athens and Helsinki), together with the targets in terms of KPIs, were then presented in detail by Riccardo Santoro of FS Technology, Petr Buchníček of Oltis Group, Annie Kortsari of CERTH/HIT and Jari Honkonen of Forum Virium Helsinki.
All of the presentations and the recording of the event are available on the project website: https://ride2rail.eu/
You can also subscribe to the RIDE2RAIL newsletter on the website and follow RIDE2RAIL on Twitter @Ride2Rail
