ERRAC ROADMAP WPO3: Urban, Suburban and Regional Rail and Urban Mobility

AbstractThe presentation shall focus on the two Roadmaps prepared by Work Package 3 (WP3) of the European R&D project ERRAC ROADMAP, which is led by UITP - the International Association of Public Transport – and ANSALDO STS, on behalf of UNIFE – the European Association of Rail Manufacturers.Both UITP and UNIFE are “rail representative bodies” in front of the European Union, representing urban, suburban and regional rail operators (UITP) and suppliers (UNIFE), and as such are involved in three important areas which are very much cross-related: legislation, standardization and research. In this overall background, European R&D is an important tool for preparing actions in the two other areas. The European Commission therefore supported the creation of the Rail Technology Platform ERRAC (European Rail Research Advisory Council) from 2001, and later awarded the partners of ERRAC several R&D projects as Coordinated and Support Actions. In line with ERRAC Strategic Research Agenda produced in 2002 and updated in 2007, UITP and UNIFE have already been jointly involved in several major R&D projects like: LibeRTiN, MODURBAN, URBAN TRACK, MODSafe and SECUR-ED.Within ERRAC ROADMAP, among six work packages, WP3 concentrates on the preparation of two roadmaps for research on “Urban, Suburban and Regional Rail” and on “Urban Mobility”. This Work Package is made of two major tasks, one dedicated to local rail, and another one focusing on Urban Mobility. The second task has very unusual characteristics: it is a joint task of two different R&D projects, ERRAC ROADMAP and ERTRAC SAFIER, supporting two different Technology Platforms, ERRAC and ERTRAC (European Road Transport Research Advisory Council). This situation results from the fact that Urban Mobility research actions cannot be developed only on a “modal” approach – rail or road – but require an intermodal or co-modal approach in order to produce sustainable mobility integrating all transport modes and their relation with land use. The topic “Urban Mobility” is addressed in both projects as a kind of follow-up of the FP6 project “EURFORUM” – European Research for Urban Mobility – and its objective is to produce an agenda for future research shared by all stakeholders of Urban Mobility