Railway stations hold a unique position in the urban landscape: they not only act as complex nodes of mobility and transport, but also as public places that can be seen as integral elements of the city. Consequently, stations have a decisive impact on their urban surroundings as places of everyday life, affecting all stakeholders including citizens and the environment. The central ambition of RAIL4CITIES is to develop a new operational, readily available and highly applicable model of stations (SCP model), combined with a common European methodology and tool for its effective implementation. The project takes inter-dependent impediments (profit-orientated business model, complex web of agents and stakeholders, policy gaps) into account and provides decision makers with the tools to transform stations into promoters of sustainable cities. The model will be applied to 5 living labs addressing the stations’ transformation into hubs of green and active mobility (FR), energy hubs (IT), towards Transit Oriented Development (DE), into a socially-inclusive services hub with using Nature Based Solutions (PL) and services hubs enabling the 15-minute city and circular economy (BE). This will be enhanced by 3 case-studies from the high-speed rail line from Lisbon to Oporto (PT) to study the resilience of infrastructures for both adaptation of spaces to new future uses, and adaptation to climate-change issues and health crises. With 14 partners from 7 European countries, further supported by 9 institutions through letters of support, the RAIL4CITIES consortium and ecosystem integrates the relevant stakeholders from universities, industry, government and the public, and is therefore in the position to design, evaluate and publish a EU-wide model for transforming existing stations or designing new ones into socio-technical systems operating as city’s greening engines for the surrounding environment, and new urban hubs aggregating multiple services for the users and its citizens

A swift transition to zero emissions and climate resilient transport systems requires that passenger and freight transport no longer are addressed separately and in isolation from one another. Passenger and freight transport must be addressed together so that policies, infrastructure (physical and digital), vehicles and energy sources serve both. These will be tackled in an integrated and coherent way in six urban nodes: from policy definition, to planning and implementation in the cities cooperating in MOVE21. The tested and integrated approach will then be disseminated across Europe. This integrated approach ensures that potential negative effects from applying zero emission solutions in one domain are not transferred to other domains, but are instead mitigated. It also ensures that European transport systems will become more resilient. Central to the integrated approach of MOVE21 are three Living Labs in Oslo, Gothenburg and Hamburg and three replicator cities: Munich, Bologna and Rome. In these, different types of mobility hubs and associated innovations are tested, and means to overcome barriers for clean and smart mobility are deployed. The Living Labs are based on an open innovation model with quadruple helix partners. The co-creation processes are supported by coherent policy measures and by increasing innovation capacity in city governments and local ecosystems. The proposed solutions will deliver new, close to market ready solutions that have been proven to work in different regulatory and governance settings. The Living Labs are designed to outlast MOVE21 by applying a self-sustaining partnership model that builds on already existing, strong partnerships for zero emission solutions. MOVE21 comprises 24 partners (six public authorities, two public transport companies owned by municipalities, six industry partners (two of which are SMEs), six research organisations and four network organisations) from seven different European countries.

“MOTIONAL” will enable the improved planning and operational management of services and offers and is therefore of paramount importance to meet the European ambitious target to make rail the preferred mode of transport in the future. It will enable the future European railway system to be interoperable, resilient, able to adapt capacity and able to integrate all involved services including last mile operations, exploiting the opportunities provided by digitalization. The “MOTIONAL” developments for the future European Traffic Management are key to achieve the foreseen Single European Rail Area. Today, rail traffic is managed on national/regional level supported by legacy systems with a poor level of digitalization and weak integration with systems of other actors participating in the overall traffic planning and management process. Through the development of functional requirements, associated specifications and operational or technological solutions and by taking advantage of the potential of digitalization, “MOTIONAL” will pave the way towards the implementation of the future European Rail Traffic Management System to make rail the backbone of a multimodal transport system for passengers and freight. The planned activities to achieve the objectives of Destination 1 are carried out in two major workstreams. Workstream 1 has the three major focus areas, Planning and Operation activities (dealing with the future interactively linked timetable planning and operational traffic management systems) and Integration activities (dealing with railway services to offer door-to-door mobility). Workstream 2 will deliver a set of digital enablers for all Europe’s Rail Destinations (i.e.“transversal”) to support the development of destination-specific digitalization solutions as Digitalization is a fundamental transformational process encompassing the Rail System as a whole.